Reef Angel Forum

I'm having problems with my at&t netgear 7550 router. I can view my portal on my own network and on my phone if I'm using my wifi, just fine. If I go to someone else's network and use their wifi I can't view it with my android app on my phone, but if I go to the RA website on another network, I can view my portal and make changes to it. Roberto thought maybe that my router dosen't support NAT loopback. Has anybody else seen this problem? If so what did you do to fix it?

Also what is the difference between static NAT and NAT loopback? In my router I have three options for unsolicited traffic, dropped, static NAT, and IP-Pass through.

Loopback means that when you are on your private network (own wifi network), if you are trying to access your public IP address (or the dns entry to your network), your router will know the difference and be able to handle the request and forward it on to the device on your network.

Example:
your public IP is 99.99.99.99.
your private network uses 192.168.1.X.
your ra is assigned to 192.168.1.5.
your router forwards any request from outside your network to 99.99.99.99 on port 2000 to 192.168.1.5
when your phone is on your network, you get an ip address of 192.168.1.100. you can then access your ra with the address 192.168.1.5.
when your phone is not on your network, you get an ip address of 88.88.88.88. you have to use your network public ip address of 99.99.99.99 to access your ra. your phone doesn't know how to get to 192.168.1.5.
to solve this problem without having to change ip addresses of the controller all the time, you simply put your public ip address (99.99.99.99) in the app and have the app try to access this all the time.

now, if your router has loopback support, it knows when you are on your network with an ip address of 192.168.1.100 and you try to access 99.99.99.99 (your public ip address), that it needs to forward that request on to 192.168.1.5 and everything works fine.
if your router does not have loopback support, when you are on your home network with ip address 192.168.1.100 and try to access 99.99.99.99, your router gets confused and does not forward the data on to 192.168.1.5 because it does not do port forwarding coming from the internal side of your router. it only does port forwarding when the request comes from the external (wan) port / ip address.

now, after this long example and explanation, inside the android app, i created 2 profiles a Home and Away profile. this was designed for the exact same reason. you setup the app to use your private network ip address of the ra when you are on your Home profile. then, in the Away profile, you put in your public ip address (or the dynamic dns name for it). when you are at home, you use the Home profile and when you are away from home & not on your home network, you use the Away profile. this way it will always work properly for you. if you forget to switch when you leave, you will get an error connecting because it can't reach your ra and you will check and realize that you forgot to switch.
the app does not automatically switch profiles for you.

hopefully that makes sense to you and helps out.

I understand some of what your saying, but how do you create a away and home profile? In the upper left hand corner of my phone screen,if I click on the icon it just shows home but no away.

Drs1210 wrote:I understand some of what your saying, but how do you create a away and home profile? In the upper left hand corner of my phone screen,if I click on the icon it just shows home but no away.

you need to open up the settings for the app. there you will see the 2 profiles. the home profile will contain your current address and the away will be empty. when you put an address in the away profile, it will enable you to select the away profile.

Sent from my Nexus 7

Sorry for my ignorance, but I can't seem to find the settings anywhere. Where do I locate it?

I found the settings menu on my tablet, but my phone does not have that menu.

Drs1210 wrote:I found the settings menu on my tablet, but my phone does not have that menu.

the settings menu is the 3 vertical dots in the title bar on the top right.
if the phone does not have that, then it probably has the actual buttons. if you have hardware buttons, then you will press the menu button which looks kinda square or like a piece of paper. that will bring up the menu for you to select settings.

Sent from my Nexus 7

Ok I found it, thanks!