Ok, so this may be a little techie, but I need to rant. I’ve had Verizon’s wireless laptop card/ (now transitioned to my Blackberry) for almost 3 years now and its VERY fast. I love being able to just plug in anywhere and get on the internet at up to 1000kbps. They are still very fast, that’s not what I ‘m ranting about…
What happened, less than a month ago, is they started to BLOCK all incoming ports. Which means I can no longer have someone remote into my computer when I’m out on a job site, or connect directly in any way through VNC or any web server protocol. It’s very annoying and did not use to be like that.
Why I’m really pissed is that I have a trade show this next week where we are showing off our remote lighting controls for recreational ball fields, and I need people to be able to log directly into my laptop at the show to control the lights from their blackberries/iphones/web enabled phones. It will be great fun but Verizon is trying to kill it.
I talked with Verizon tech support and the first lady told me they don’t block ANY ports and it was on my end. I told her I don’t think so. It works just fine with any other connection. I finally got to upper tech support and he read me my TOS, and said those ports should have been blocked forever and I was lucky to get them through until now.
Long story short, I now have to VPN into my home network, then I can do everything I want. It will work for the show, so HA.
Stupid Verizon. You are on notice.
Do you hear the violin playing??? 🙂 Poor baby. One thing I know to be true about you…if you find a roadblock, you usually find an alternate route. Must take after your mom. 🙂 Proud of you, son.
But doesn’t VPN require that ‘some’ ports or at least port be open? And if verizon blocks all ports then …..
Not sure how to approach this.
I understand how old this post is, but I believe this may help you, if you still have this issue, and others.
Verizon Wireless offers a data plan that is higher than the usual unlimited plan. They call it the Enterprise Activation? …blah Plan?…. The plan, apparently, is for Enterprise need like exchange and Active Sync and adds a $49.99 charge to your plan. When I talked to the tier 3 tech(the smarter of the dumb rocks) I was told that it does take the incoming rejection rule off.
I was interested in this because I want to host a functional website(current location, movement,…) from my android phone on Verizon Wireless’s network and could not, for the longest time, understand why the server on my phone could not be contacted by clients. After ripping the software to pieces on my phone I came to the conclusion that it was not my phone’s issue, and called VZW tech support. On Monday I plan to call our VZW business rep and upgrade to the enterprise data plan.
As of this moment I am still not 100% this upgrade does what the smart rock told me it would but I will know soon enough.
Interesting, I had never heard anything about a Enterprise data plan. That is good to know for the future.
Oh and to answer:
jeff says:
March 10, 2010 at 8:15 pm
But doesn’t VPN require that ‘some’ ports or at least port be open? And if Verizon blocks all ports then …..
Not sure how to approach this.
Most server-client forms of VPN do not require any open incoming ports(except Established state, which already must be allowed for website requests and such). Usually end point VPN clients connect to the server through their house’s network or starbuck’s network which by default should reject or drop all incoming connections like Verizon’s network. The client must establish a connection to server thus allowing Established state data to come back through from server to client.
Might as well sign off:
-Craig Hesling
I’m able to VPN into my network through my Verizon card, but have never tried allowing others into my network through it. Seems like it would be too slow to get anything done.
Before I started on this phone server idea I considered having my phone VPNed into my server continuously and route traffic through server’s network…but… I already have battery issues and maintaining an active connections seem brutal.
You could do the txt message thing that some apps look at. The person/app on the web sends a txt to the phone #, then the android opens up a port and sends data back to the web. I think this is how Mobile Defense used to work.
If I’m getting you right, that sounds pretty cool. Might take a bit of scripting tho. My implementation of your solution would be to monitor a vhost on central server from home. It would be configured to proxy data from my phone. I would then customize the proxy request on the server to send and email to “my number”@vtext.com and sit tight for http returning data from phone. The phone would filter sms and wait for the magic message. Upon receiving the magic message it would make a connection with the server and give back the requester page.
I obviously skipped a lot of detail in this solution, but I hope this could potentially help someone in need of a solution. If I write any scripts or code for this solution I will make note of it and explain where to get it and how to use it.