4G webcam installation

[veginfor]

Hi everyone
I'm new on this forum. I already set up several ipcams on WiFi in the past, but it's my first 4G cam.
So I bought a 4G cam online. I first tested it on my WiFi and everything worked fine.
Next, I placed the cam outdoor (where no WiFi available) and put in the SIM card of my mobile phone operator.
In fact, the cam is acting as a MiFi-router and my mobile phone operator doesn't assign a public IP to this (they confirm this policy). So I get connection to internet, but the WAN IP is 10.x.x.x.
In this way, I can't connect remotely to my cam as I don't know its public IP.
I decided to set up a VPN. My cam only allows PPTP. I know it's not secure, but I have no choice. The VPN is meant as a way to connect rather than as a security feature.
I set up a PPTP-server on my own VPS (Debian 8.11). The PPTP-server is working fine: both a Windows computer and an Android device can connect smoothly. Internal port forwarding is working.
But the cam CANNOT connect over VPN! As I can manage all settings of the PPTP-server, I tried out dozens of combinations, but without any success!
In the logs of the PPTP-server, I find mainly:

MGR: dropped slow initial connection
MGR: Maximum of 100 connections reduced to 6, not enough IP addresses given
MGR: Manager process started
MGR: Maximum of 6 connections available
​

So the internet connection is working as I get connection logs on my VPS, the cam is working as I can get the live stream when I connect a computer directly to the MiFi of the cam, but how can I get the video remotely?

Can anyone help me?

Thanks
Andre

 

[Camit]

No offense but a 4G camera makes absolutely no sense , also WiFi wouldn’t be recommended either, is it really that hard to run a cat 6 cable poe/data.. one cable and be done with it. Jw why?

 

[veginfor]

I agree, but I do need 4G because the cam is placed on a construction area where no other internet connection is available at this moment. No WiFi nor cabled modem, DSL, ...

 

[pozzello]

seems to me you need a SIM card with a DATA plan that gets you an IP address.
Not much point in making a phone call from the cam, but I suppose notifications via SMS might be useful...

what sort of cam is it? brand/model...

 

[tangent]

Most cellular data plans block direct remote access to your devices.
If you're getting a private ip, you may also be behind carrier grade nat.

 

[pozzello]

Most cellular data plans block direct remote access to your devices.
If you're getting a private ip, you may also be behind carrier grade nat.

makes sense. In that case, maybe one can set it up to 'push' a stream to cloud storage or your own NAS?...

 

[Camit]

This is a very off the wall answer and prob not worth it but it might work you will need to do your own research on it to give you better details. But the owl car camera has a 4g connection with a mobile app to alert your phone. Also it’s expensive but if you’re a contractor that wants to keep an eye on his properties this might work again research it yourself .

Video

Buy
Owl Car Cam - Video security for your car, driving and parked

 

[Valiant]

Seems a lot of people (myself included) are eagerly awaiting 5G and IPV6 to simplify this.

 

[tangent]

To remotely access a cam on a cellular connection, you typically have to use something that maintains an outgoing connection like hamachi or ngrok

 

[veginfor]

Hello everybody
@pozzello, my SIM card has a DATA plan. As you can see above, I can trace activity of my cam in my VPS logs, so the cam IS online.
@tangent, indeed, the cam is behind a CGN. As I stated above, my mobile phone operator doesn't assign a public IP to devices acting as a MiFi-router. They confirm it's their policy.
Therefore I set up a VPN on my own server (PPTP-protocol). Hamachi and ngrok are commercial VPN-servers doing the same.
But the problem is I don't find the right way to establish the VPN-tunnel from cam to VPN-server. See logs above.
Here a screenshot of the VPN interface of the cam:



Does anybody experienced the right VPN-settings with a 4G cam? Encryption, packet length, MRU, MTU, etc.?

Thanks
Andre