I recently moved to Japan from the US. In my US apartment, I had cable internet (own modem and router) and ran a Nextcloud server on a raspberry pi with external access enabled through a free `afraid.org` namespace.
My current apartment in Japan has Fibergate internet, which is offered to everyone in the building for free, which is nice. No modem is required, so I plugged my router (the same one from before) into the LAN port, both my laptop and my pi server into the router. I can access the server through the local IP but my connections are hanging with suspected firewall issues when trying to connect through my www namespace.
The only thing I can thing I can think of here is that Fibergate’s service blocks external requests. Can anyone confirm? Does anyone have experience setting up a home server in Japan that can help?
Thanks! I know this is a bit of an edge case but I’m hoping someone here can help.
11 comments
“free” mansion internet is centrally managed and as you found out there’s no way to access it from outside because basically everyone in the building is probably sharing the same line / ip address.
if you’re third floor or below and can convince your building management you need your own internet line, and you’re in service area for NTT/KDDI/Nuro etc then you can try to apply for your own. generally tho, in buildings with this kind of internet arrangement, the management is going to be very hard to convince.
alternatively you can run a VPN host on a VPS somewhere on public internet, connect to it from your equipment at the house, and then access it via the public network through your vpn server.
I’m not familiar with that provider, but it’s likely you’re on a shared IP with a ton of other units so it is going to be difficult for certain things to be routed. It’s also possible that for security reasons they block such connections. It’s almost certain, also, that they don’t allow server hosting on their network because it would be viewed as hogging communal resources.
Maybe you could try using different ports. The ISP might be blocking the inbound ports, so if you use other ports, you might be able to access your network remotely. I had a similar issue with my ISP and that’s how I solved it, though it wasn’t for Nextcloud.
You can try VPN
I’ve got a somewhat similar problem running a Foundry VTT server off Leone in a Leopalace. It’s… something.
If you aren’t able to open it up to the public internet you can use tailscale, or a competitor like cloudflare access, to get access to your server.
Well, you don’t even mention it, but are you getting a public IP or is there some kind of NAT?
Yeah 100% you are behind a CGN.
It could be an external routing issue related to afraid.org. You might try investigating that possibility.
Your internet connection is most likely behind an NAT/CGNAT.
You might be able to ask for advice on r/selfhosted
I am sorry for the super unrelated comment. I tried to set up my own web server on my raspberry PI using Nginx, and the only thing I couldn’t manage to do was port forwarding. Even though I set it to my raspberry pi local address I could not access it through my external IP address ;-;
I own my own router, but I was wondering, do ISPs in Japan prevent you from doing this?