Have you looked at ZeroTier?
It’s a fantastic tool and makes remote management so simple.
I have a Pi at my holiday home in Spain with ZeroTier client installed. This gives it a unique “global” IP address in my ZeroTier system and I can then simply open a browser on any machine that has the ZeroTier client installed and access my Node-Red control panel. Speed is fantastic, just as if the Pi was part of my home network.
I also have a mini PC in Spain that I can turn on remotely (using a Sonoff type switch) and I was previously using this over TeamViewer as a way to do OTA updates to devices, or to log on to devices that aren’t “ZeroTier aware” such as my router. I now use Windows Remote Desktop over ZeroTier and that’s about 5 times faster than TeamViewer.
It’s also great for MQTT Explorer. I have a connection to the ZeroTier IP for my Spanish Pi, and can view the MQTT traffic there as if I was on the same physical network.
If you install the client on a phone or tablet then you can also do the same stuff, and can even put the global IP of the Blynk server in your custom server settings of the Blynk app. The only slight drawback to this is that some devices will turn the ZeroTier client off after a period of inactivity, so you have to fire-up the app to turn it back on again before launching the Blynk app.
But, for people running a local server on a Double NAT internet connection it’s one of the few ways to access the local server remotely.
What a coincidence! I’ve just come by Zerotier yesterday by reading another post here on the forum. Made a quick look to the service, only
Now that you make this exposition of the practicality of it, I will surely look into it.
For what I saw, it is seems simpler than Wireguard.
Thanks!
@PeteKnight I also use Node-Red, Mosquitto as my MQTT broker running on RasPI but I do not have Blynk running on local server. What are the advantages of Blynk local server?
For me, the biggest advantage is that I do not need to rely on the “cloud”.
Even if I loose Internet I can control everything in my house.
Also, I don’t like to give my privacy to clouds.
And for last, you get more control over admin stuff, I think, because I never used the “cloud” version to compare.
I still use Blynk cloud for my home automation, but I’ve been running a local yet server for some time and have cloned all of my cloud projects across to it - I just need to do the last part and point my app and Node-Red connections across to the local server.
I’ve been holding off because I’ve been beta testing the new version of Blynk, so putting quite a bit of time into that, and waiting to see what the new version offered.
I’ve decided that I will make the switch over to my local server soon, as I don’t think the new version is something that I’ll be migrating to in the short to medium term and I’d like to put the server in a place where I have control.
@PeteKnight@hmgp Thanks I still am a little confused. How do you connect to your devices with your phone without the cloud. I still want to be able to control devices when away from home with my phone.
To control away from home, with a local server, according to Pete, you have a simple option that is ZeroTier. I was inclined to a Wireguard VPN installed in my home setup, but I’m going to look at Pete suggestion as it seems simpler to implement.
If you don’t want to use ZeroTier or similar then you can simply set-up a DDNS service with an updater client on your Pi. This will mean that when your public IP address changes, the DSNS service will always point to your public IP.
You then forward the relevant ports to your Pi, and put the DDNS url in your custom server settings.
@PeteKnight I have a question about Zerotier. I installed ZT client on my Pi which runs my Node-Red and MQTT. Also installed the ZT app on my android phone. The ZT central dashboard on my laptop shows both the RPi and Pixel 4A android phone on line. I would like to connect my phone to Node-Red Dashboard. I think I need to add a route. Is the destination the LAN of the node-red dashboard 192.168.1.7 :1880/ui and the (via) my IP address?
Hi Paul,
I think it’s simpler than that (although I don’t use NR dashboard).
Just look-up the ZT IP address for your NR server and type that in the browser of your phone, and append :1880/ui to the end and it should work.
You’ll find that the ZT app turns itself off after a while (I think it’s a power saving thing) so you may need to launch the app and slide the switch to the ON position first.
Hi Pete,
Success! That was simple. I did a lot of searching but didn’t find the detail I needed. Just trying to be proactive incase Blynk doesn’t add Node-Red integration to V2. Thank you Pete!
