Can't access BI via Mobil App on work wifi

[fleetmack]

I started a new job this week. For data usage reasons, I prefer my phone (Android 7.0, Droid Turbo 2) to be on wifi rather than 4g all the time. However, they appear to have a firewall in place as my phone's Blue Iris app can not connect to my home server any more. I can on 4g and my home wifi, but not on my work's wifi.

Does anybody know of either:
a) A setting that allows BI to always use 4g?
b) A software that tells certain android apps to use 4g even if wifi is connected?

I have been toying around with Mobiwol, but I think what that is doing is simply disabling BI altogether whenever I'm connected to BI, so that doesn't appear to be the answer....

Can anybody help?

 

[looney2ns]

Are you using VPN to connect? If not, you should.
If so, change the port VPN use's to 443, and see if that works.
VPN Primer for Noobs

 

[truglo]

This old post is probably already sorted, but for future readers I wanted to add to looney2ns good post: Use TCP port 443 anytime you are at a place that is likely to block certain types of connections.

Work, schools, etc... usually block a bunch of stuff to prevent unsanctioned use of their networks, especially the common VPN ports (ie TCP 1723, TCP 47, UDP 500, UDP 1194...). Very strict institutions may block all but a few essential ports. That's where TCP 443 comes in handy. It will always work because nobody blocks TCP-443 (web SSL). If they did their networks would become almost useless because most of the internet these days uses SSL.

That said, using TCP 443 is slower than UDP, due to inefficiencies with layered encryption over TCP. To get the best of both worlds I run 2 servers on my asus router: one on UDP XXXX and another on TCP443. I use the UDP 99% of the time, and the TCP is used if I'm staying a while at a place that blocks my UDP access (for shorter visits I just use cell data).

Another thing to consider when it comes to running tcp vs udp (or both) on your vpn server: running TCP 443 will attract a lot of hacking attempts. On an average day with my TCP server running, my firewall logs show at least 10 attempts to send malformed packets to TCP443 (likely attempted hacks). I haven't seen any attempts to hack my UDP server though. So to minimize exposure I keep my TCP server turned off unless I know I'm going to need it (not often with unlimited cell data ). It's easy to switch a vpn server on/off on my router.

Kev