Connecting to Pi over the internet - Already tried a lot of things

Question

I read some tutorials here on connecting to my Pi via SSH. I have successfully done this over my own network. I am trying to do it from the internet (I use my phone's hotspot to attempt from outside my network), but I have had no success.

I have verizon fios, and although I do not have an official static IP address, it rarely changes (i've never seen it change in over a year) so I was just going to connect using my IP address versus setting up my own free DNS.

I am thinking I may just be misunderstanding port forwarding; here's what I did:

I made a new rule for my static raspberry pi address, saying to listen to any port, and forward to port 22 on the pi.

I use putty to attempt to connect by typing in my IP address and using port 22.

Some direction on this would be appreciated... I've been at it for hours.

Answer 1

Obviously, the problem seems to be either the port forwarding configuration, or the ability for the SSH server/RPi to handle external connections.

Port forwarding configuration

Maybe you should try with a specific external port. Let's say 10022 (external port) forward to your RPi IP address, port 22. Then from an external IP address, try telnet <your IP address> 10022. If you have a message similar to this:

$ telnet <your IP address> 10022
Trying <your IP address>...
Connected to <your IP address>.
Escape character is '^]'.
SSH-2.0-OpenSSH_6.6.1p1 Debian-7

...then, the port forwarding works well. Otherwise, you should try another server with another server, just to make sure your SSH server does not reject external connections.

iperf

I like to use iperf to make sure my device is reachable from my external network. This software allows you to test the bandwidth performances and, maybe it is not the fastest way, but it is lightweight and easy to use :-)

Install it from your RPi (sudo apt-get install iperf), then run iperf -s. The default listening port is 5001. So you will have to define another port forwarding (external port 5001 -> <RPi IP address>, port 5001). From an external IP address, run telnet <your IP address> 5001.

$ telnet <your IP address> 5001
Trying <your IP address>...
Connected to <your IP address>.
Escape character is '^]'.

If you see a similar message, then the port forwarding configuration works well. Otherwise, you should tweak your router...

SSH server configuration

If none solution of the above worked, the problem is probably in the SSH server or RPi configuration.

netstat

We will make sure the SSH server listens for every hosts. Run sudo netstat -anp | grep ssh. You see the 0.0.0.0 part of the following line? It says "I [the SSH server] will listen the port 22 but only for the hosts matching 0.0.0.0" (0.0.0.0 means "every hosts"). If you don't see it, the problem is SSH server configuration (see next section):

tcp        0      0 0.0.0.0:22              0.0.0.0:*               LISTEN      21985/sshd

/etc/ssh/ssh_config

Please copy/paste the result of cat /etc/ssh/ssh_config in the comment section.

/etc/hosts.deny & /etc/hosts.allow

You can also have a look in the following files /etc/hosts.deny & /etc/hosts.allow. Please copy/paste the result of cat /etc/hosts.deny & cat /etc/hosts.allow in the comment section.

Answer 2

Most likely the problem is your ISP, check if your ISP blocks port 22 for security reasons (mine does). Change the port to, for example 2222, portforward port 2222 on your router and try again.

ssh pi@yourpublicIPgoeshere -p 2222

do note: your ISP might also have a router installed in your home, in that case you need to forward port 2222 (or any port you want to forward) to the personal router's IP.

Again, this is also the case for me, I need to use a web portal my ISP provides to portforward on it.

addition:

sudo nano /etc/ssh/sshd_config

change the port number

service ssh restart

then check if the port is open/usable

As a sidequestion: did you have a router provided by your ISP?

Answer 3

I wanted to thank you all for your help. The issue ended up being my gateway IP being 0.0.0.0. Once I changed it back, everything worked fine. I have no idea how that got messed up, because I did connect to the internet when I first got it.

Anyways, thanks again!