NGROK Questions
- Thread starter diver165
- Start date
NGROK is a third-party service that creates a network tunnel between your computer (running Blue Iris) and the NGROK cloud service in order to expose your Blue Iris web server to the internet. It is a substitute for port forwarding designed for internet connections where IPv4 port forwarding is not available (most newer ISPs and cellular providers).
NGROK has a free usage tier where the main limitation you'd be concerned with is that it only allows 1 gigabyte of network bandwidth per month which you could exhaust in as little as about 17 minutes of remote viewing at "4K" quality. Or a few hours at a lower quality.
Easier to set up. The downside is it is not really any more secure than port forwarding; e.g. if a vulnerability is discovered in Blue Iris's web server, it will most likely be exploitable by a hacker through the NGROK tunnel.
However NGROK does apparently support injecting an authentication step in order to be able to connect to the tunneled service, so that would more or less solve the issue of being less secure than a VPN.
Not that I'm aware of. It should be pretty simple. Register an NGROK account, find the "auth token", and paste it into Blue Iris's web server configuration. Then NGROK somewhere should give you a link you can use to connect to Blue Iris.
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aesterling
Getting comfortable
I set up NGROK to test with BI last week and have been using it whenever I leave home. It works fine but seems to take a moment longer to establish the connection. I wasn’t aware of the bandwidth limits... that is probably a deal-breaker for me.
I didn’t need to download the NGROK software during the setup as it seems to be bundled with BI now. That wasn't very clear in the BI help file.
I didn’t need to download the NGROK software during the setup as it seems to be bundled with BI now. That wasn't very clear in the BI help file.
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Sounds like I'll just stick with Open VPN for now. I was hoping to figure out something different because some places (hotels etc,) block Open VPN connections on their networks.
You can probably reconfigure OpenVPN to listen on TCP port 443 (default is UDP port 1194). Then it will work more reliably because firewalls will be much less likely to block it as every website in the world uses TCP port 443.
I'll give that a try! I've ran into it a couple places (a couple Holiday Inn resorts). I usually just hot spot my laptop to my phone for a work around.