Accessing Ignition Perspective on a Campus Network

[bzamachaj]

I'm not sure if this is the right place for this, but I've been trying to access an Ignition Perspective application using the Perspective mobile app from anywhere on a college campus. There is a campus-wide WiFi network, but it seems that the WiFi my phone connects to is different from the Ethernet network my main gateway computer is on. As a result, my phone cannot find the gateway in the Perspective app.

I'm waiting for an exact response from campus IT, but it seems like there might be a lot of red tape involved in getting my phone and the gateway computer on the same network. Has anyone else dealt with a similar issue? Would it be easier to set up a local WiFi network for the gateway instead? I'm looking for some advice or ideas.

[Transistor]

Most likely the campus network is firewalled and the WiFi has guest access which does not have permissions to get to the subnet the Ignition gateway is on.

[pturmel]

Consider setting up a reverse proxy on a public host in the cloud somewhere, with a VPN tunnel from the gateway for the proxy traffic. This also makes it easy to maintain a Let's Encrypt certificate for the host name and forcing encryption on the public side.

[nminchin]

@pturmel

public host in the cloud somewhere

The last time I looked into this it was cost prohibitive. Cloud hosting can be insanely expensive

[Kevin.Herron]

I pay $6/mo for a Digital Ocean droplet... can't need that much power to host a non-production nginx somewhere, can you?

[nminchin]

There's a good chance that I could have been looking at the wrong options...

[pturmel]

I run three modest cloud server VM instances for $10/mo, $12/mo, and $12/mo respectively.

It's cheaper to do this and run Let's Encrypt than to buy a dedicated certificate for a non-cloud server.

[bmusson]

I've had a really good experience with Hetzner.
$5/mo for an instance with 2 vCPU, 2GB RAM, 40GB local disk, and 1TB of traffic.
They don't have many options for regions, so ymmv.

Nginx Proxy Manager

[michael.flagler]

If you're just wanting to access your perspective project from anywhere, just do something along the lines mentioned in this topic:

Making Home Project Open To Internet

Using the Maker edition at home I created a workout logging application tailored to my needs. I showed it to a few of my friends and they asked if they could use it as well, we figured it would be fun if we could track everyone’s activity, compete against each other, etc. As someone who’s not very IT-knowledgeable, what sort of options would I have in making this accessible to a few other select people? Cursory searching tells me that opening up my home network is not advisable since I don’t kn…

Cloudflare tunnel with a DNS name you'll have to purchase on Cloudflare, but they're cheap and this is easy to set up and includes encryption.

[msteele]

Tailscale is also an option if you're just looking for a simple tunnel for you or a select few people to access an Ignition gateway - the free tier has worked great for home service access.

[bzamachaj]

Hello everyone! Thank you for all the responses. Over the past 3 weeks I have been going between IT and some people from Ignition to try and sort out this issue. All your suggestions were great, we were just trying to avoid any circumventing of campus IT if possible. Embarrassingly on my end, the fix was super simple. For some reason the original inbound rule setup for the :8088 port was no longer actually allowing inbound connections on the network. I'm not sure if there was some issue with administrator access or something but we made a new admin account on the PC and re-setup the inbound rule and so far I have had no issues! Thank you again for all the support.