Remote extension at home office with dynamic IP

[Beachtech]

I have my FreePBX 13 box at my office. We have a static IP at the office.

I want to have a remote extension at my home office. Problem is, my home ISP does not offer static IPs, only dynamic. That means my home IP will change (once a day, once a month, no one knows and I noticed it is random). And that means I can’t program in an IP at the firewall at work or the FreePBX box itself.

So what would be the best practice for this? I checked https://wiki.freepbx.org/display/FOP/Remote+Phone+Best+Practices+and+Limitations and that doesn’t say a lot.

I don’t have a VPN at home because, since everything I do is cloud-based, I don’t need a VPN. Would like to see what I can do without doing a VPN just for the phone, but I can do it if that is the only option.

[dicko]

One solution is to note what your current external ip is

curl ifconfig.me

then see what the underlying network is

whois $(curl -s ifconfig.me)

look for CIDR: and white list that network, if there is no CIDR there would likely be a NetRange: , use that

whois $(curl -s ifconfig.me)|egrep -i “cidr|netrange”

might be simpler

[adtopkek]

Can’t you enable the responsive firewall? It allows extensions to attempt registering from any IP then if they fail so many times they get blocked. Just make sure you have a good Password. It works great for our dynamic IP customers, we used to have to add their IP non-stop.

[lgaetz (Lorne Gaetz)]

Responsive works, alternatively if you have DDNS service running at home, you can white list the FQDN in firewall. Or do both, in a belt-and-suspenders approach.

[cynjut (Dave Burgess)]

Another option would be to set up a home network->PBX (or home network <-> Work network) VPN.

If you decide you want to do that, let me know. I cannot get my head around how to do it, but I’d love to figure it out.

DDNS would be faster and easier to set up, but I really would love to figure out how this VPN thing works…

[frankb]

DDNS client at the remote site. Enter your given URL into the whitelist on your freepbx server and mark it as trusted.

5 min very effective solution. Set your ddns client to check for changes often … I set mine to 600 seconds normally.

[PitzKey (Itzik)]

Talking here about DDNS. Which company do you guys suggest? What is working great and not expensive?

[arielgrin]

I’m using duckdns and afraid.org, both are free and working great, no need to confirm after 30 days like noip, in case your ip doesn’t change that often.