assign port for remote access via 4g router

[zac123]

Hi All,

i have a few of miners at a remote location (Avalon's 741) they use the OpenWrt OS. I have them connected to a 4G router with a sim card in. They work absolutely fine. However what i'd like to do it setup a VPN so i can access each one separately from my laptop wherever i may be.

Ive set the the router up for DuckDNS and from looking at the router control panel it seems quite easy to forward a port to a particular host.

The thing i'm stuck on is how to assign a port number to the miner in the OpenWrt. Can anyone help me with this please?

zac

[DaveF]

DO NOT DO THIS.
DO NOT GIVE ACCESS TO YOUR MINERS TO THE OUTSIDE WORLD.

Put a small PC / RPi behind the same router and connect to that.
If you cant use a VPN to get in securely at least use something with 2FA to connect to the machine behind the router.

-Dave

[zac123]

I have got a spare RPi so thats quite a good idea. just plug that into the router and then connect all the miners to that. but... excuse my ignorance but how is that safer please?
zac

[PassThePopcorn]

There is a difference between opening the miner to the outside and you connecting into your network.
With port forwarding anyone that hits your ip and that port gets to the miner and there are plenty of crawlers out there attempting to, it's happened with a lot of different hardware that isn't behind a firewall. It's far safer to keep the miner behind the firewall and connect into the network, and if you do set up a pi do not forward it out from your router/firewall, use a vpn program to connect in.

If your network is on ip 184.72.19.29 and you forward your miner on port 9848 anyone connecting to 184.72.19.29:9848 can get to your miner. I have a local webserver on a different external ip, as soon as it was hooked up and opened it started logging login attempts.

[zac123]

is VNC a safe option? so if i installed VNC on the pi then accessed the miners like that?
zac

[DaveF]

So long as you are using a very strong password it's safer. Not 100% safe but much better then putting the front end of the miner out to the public.
I don't know how secure you can make VNC with 2FA or other security but it's much better then forwarding the miner web page.

On a side note, with 4G you are loosing some profit mining, there is more latency in sending / receiving data then with cable / fiber / dsl so you will get some more rejected shares.
I do not have any hard and fast data to the amount but I know it is there.

-Dave

[zac123]

thanks for the reply. yes unfortunately 4g was the only option for this particular location. my other locations are fibre.

[PassThePopcorn]

I'd say to still use  a VPN like openvpn, I'm not 100% sure but this seems to be one that works with a pi. @ zac123 I would check openvpn's website to see if they have any links to do this as well (do your due diligence)

https://www.ovpn.com/en/guides/raspberry-pi-raspbian
https://www.comparitech.com/vpn/what-is-a-vnc-and-how-does-it-differ-from-a-vpn/

As for 4g it's not great but you can only use what's available. For only 1 machine/connection it should be just fine, the avalons don't do much in the way of connections like the s9's do they do a dns query to resolve the pool then stay there for a while, bandwidth is limited on them on 24 851's on 1 pi they top off at around 15kbs but average 10-12.

If you have a bunch of miners a simple dns forwarder / cache server would work to limit the outbound requests, it won't do anything for the work the miners need to process.