Accessing Ignition Perspective on a Campus Network

Educational Engagement
1

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.

2

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.

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3

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.

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4

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

5

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

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6

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

7

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.

8

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.

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9

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

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.

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10

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.

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