Forum Discussion

chigirl97's avatar
chigirl97
New Contributor II
4 years ago

Work From Home/Port Forwarding Issue

Hello! 

Recently my office is having everyone work for home a day or two out of the week to limit the number of people in the office because of COVID. I am having trouble accessing the database for the new ERP we are implementing. After adding my home IP address (it has not changed since they white listed it), I was told by their support to try the telnet command in command prompt to see if the port was blocked (It is not a part of the Cox blocked port list either). I am able to connect just fine when I am in the office (both with ethernet cable and on wifi), but when I go home it didn't work. So, after a little bit of research, I tried using port forwarding to gain access to the port, but it still has not worked. Does anyone have any ideas?

Things I've tried:

  • Having IP address white listed
  • Restarting router
  • Connecting with an ethernet cable
  • Port forwarding

Thank you in advance!

Port forwarding
  • Bruce's avatar
    Bruce
    Honored Contributor III
    4 years ago

    What were the results of your telnet?

    • chigirl97's avatar
      chigirl97
      New Contributor II
      4 years ago

      "Could not open connection to the host: Connect failed"

      It connects just fine when I am in the office, but when I am home it doesn't connect.

      • Bruce's avatar
        Bruce
        Honored Contributor III
        4 years ago

        When you say "in the office," you're talking about being at work and on the private network of your office?  This would be normal because you have an authorized private IP address on a private network.

        When your tech admin said "no VPN," were they referring to your privately-subscribed VPN or actually using the VPN of the offfice?  Meaning, does your work want you to connect directly to the cloud-based database...as opposed to your request first going to your work and then being re-directed to the cloud-based database?

  • Bruce's avatar
    Bruce
    Honored Contributor III
    4 years ago

    A "Bridge" is a LAN term to connect (bridge) 2 separate networks together.  You'd think, "Wouldn't this 'bridge' just be a router?  It could be a router to connect the networks but the router, in this case, would be called a Gateway.

    The difference between a Bridge and a Router is the addresses each uses to...for lack of a better term...route traffic.  Routers use IP addresses to route and Bridges use MAC addresses.

    FYI:  A MAC address is programmed into the NIC by its manufacturer.  A MAC address should be permanent but some manufacturers allow it to be programmable or changed.

    In this case, you have a combo modem-router.  The Cox network terminates at the modem portion of this combo device and then transfers traffic to router portion.  It's all internally transferred so you have no access to it.

    If you wanted to troubleshoot (or use a better router), you could turn off the router portion of this combo device.  Meaning...you don't want the router to assign IP addresses or route anything...but instead to just transfer the traffic from the modem to whatever is connected to the router portion, such as another router or computer.

    Since traffic will still be traveling through the router portion, the router, in this case, is just "bridging" the traffic onto your network (the other router) and staying at Layer-2 of the networking protocol.  The other router would be Layer-3 (IP addresses).

    Bottom line.  There are 2 networks involved:  the Cox network (modem) and your personal, private, home network (router).  The Pano is your private network because it controls all your devices connected to it either wired or wireless.  If you didn't want the Pano to control your home network, you could put it into Bridge Mode to just transfer all traffic to/from the modem to whatever would be your home network.