Ports and Packets (Ep-4 of The $0 cloud)
After all that—setting up Nginx and hiding the ports—I was excited because I thought I was finally going to deploy my website without spending a single penny or relying on free tiers. But just blindly throwing everything onto the internet felt wrong, so I started learning how packets actually travel from the internet to my machine. And oh boy, did I learn a lot. As I dug deeper, I learned that…
After setting up Nginx and concealing ports, the excitement grew as deployment of the website without monetary expenditure seemed within reach. However, blindly uploading everything onto the internet felt wrong, prompting a deeper investigation into packet travel from the internet to the machine. As the research progressed, it became evident that packets do not magically pinpoint a server's location, but rather journey through routers, ISPs, and numerous systems along the way.
The discovery revealed that the router was not exposed to the internet as initially believed; a public IP address was necessary for the machine to receive packets from any corner of the world. By executing scripts on the server, the presumed public IP was obtained, and port forwarding was established in the ISP's administrative interface.
Nonetheless, disappointment ensued when accessing the website from outside the network proved futile. The revelation came when a "public" IP address starting with 10 was identified. A search led to the understanding that addresses commencing with 10.x.x.x are private addresses, rendering them inaccessible from the public internet.
This led to the conclusion that it was not the router's public IP after all. CGNAT (Carrier-Grade Network Address Translation) became the focal point, employed by most Indian ISPs. The mechanism groups multiple routers in an area behind a single public IP due to the depletion of IPv4 addresses and the escalating cost of dedicated public IPs.
Regrettably, forward requests to the server could not be executed because control over the public IPv4 address was absent. Solutions emerged with Cloudflare, offering a novel approach.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
