Use ZeroTier with Blue Iris - view your cameras remotely and securely!

today I'm going to show you how to access Blue Iris outside your home without doing any sort of port forwarding or setting up a traditional VPN I've always had some concerns about port forwarding because technically you're leaving a port basically open to the internet on your firewall and setting up a client VPN on all of your devices just sometimes isn't practical or even possible so how do we solve this problem well with a service called zero tier before I face this particular problem I had heard of zero tier but really never dove into what it was not only did it solve this problem but I think it opens the doors to a whole new way of networking software-defined networking that's not limited to the firewall and the network you have in your house or in your business in fact the mission of the company is to directly connect the world's devices and enable a new era of decentralized computing pretty cool so what the heck is it how does it work think of it as similar to a VPN but at the same time different how it works is you build a virtual sort of Global Network and this is separate from your existing local networks you install the zero tier software on whatever device you have laptop phones Etc they even have Nas and Linux and a whole bunch of different clients and then you build out your network and each of these devices join your network from there xeroter hosts these beacons and your devices actually communicate up to these beacons but it's outward traffic outbound traffic from your network once your devices are joined to the network and they're communicating out to one or many of these beacons zero tier is then smart enough to figure out how the traffic should best route for example if I have a device here and a device on the other side of my house to proxy that traffic all the way out to zero tier and back wouldn't be smart so zero tier figures out what's the best route for the traffic and it sends it through there it uses a concept called UDP hole punching hopefully I haven't lost you already and if you're not a networking person that's totally fine I know I'm kind of spewing a lot of things out here but stick with me and we'll get it going on Blue Iris in a second so once you've built this software-defined virtual Network you can join your blue iris PC to that Network and in Turn Blue Iris Software and the web server not only does this work great for my regular old Comcast internet now I don't have to have port forwarding on my firewall it also works with starlink in this carrier grade Nat scenario and since doing this I found 100 other ways that I can explore zero tier but those are for future videos alright so before we switch to the computer and I actually show you how to get this set up two more things one everybody's gonna ask well what does it cost for most of us out there who are just doing a simple Network it's going to be totally free and that's one of the best things about this there are paid plans if you're going to get into a very very large Network or multiple networks if you're doing this for a business or Enterprise and it does support that so you could pay and it's even even then it's not super expensive but for most of us it's going to be free so the second thing I'm going to get asked is is it secure and the answer is yes the traffic from each of these devices up through zero tier and back is all encrypted so it's just like a VPN in the sense that it's a tunnel and even if you were to do a packet capture like some other YouTubers have done you wouldn't actually be able to see what's going through the lines really the only data that zero tier is going to be able to see are your public IP addresses from each client and where they're connecting from and if you were that paranoid you could actually host your own zero tier Beacon and run this on your own but that's definitely an edge case and I think most of you will be fine with running it through zero tier so let's switch over to the tutorial I'll show show you how to do it it's really not that hard trust me it's it's easy to set up and we'll have you up and running and then you'll be able to turn off that port forwarding and be more secure so the first thing you're going to want to do is go to zerothier.com or just Google Zero tier and it's going to bring you to their home page if you want to take a look at pricing we'll click on the pricing Pages for a second shows you some of the statistics network members up to 50. like I said for most people that's probably going to be fine with one admin but if you do want to get up to the professional or Enterprise level they do have those options too so what you're going to want to do is Click sign up enter your name email and create a password once you log in and verify your email you're going to be brought to this page now you won't have any networks and I'm just blocking my main Network this is kind of a dummy Network that I use just to test out here but you want to click create Network once you create the network you're going to click on it so here's the page for our Network so the first thing you can do is name the network so we're going to call this blue iris test and we'll call this test Network in most cases you're going to want it to be a private Network which means you will personally authorize each member of the network this is your network ID it'll also say at the bottom this is what you're actually going to type into each client so your phone your laptop the blue iris PC right here is what you're going to need for them to join onto this virtual network if we scroll down you'll notice that you're automatically going to be assigned a block of IP addresses now you can choose one that doesn't conflict with your network typically these aren't because the second octet won't usually be a network that you're going to use in your home lab or your business so generally you can just choose one or let it auto assign now each device that joins this network right here is going to be issued an IP just like a dhcpip where like when you plug into your network and your router gives you an IP it's just like this these you can leave unchecked for now all this you can leave the same and we have no devices have joined the network so you really don't have to do anything besides naming it on this page when a new device tries to join it's going to show up here let's download the client so at the top you'll click download and here all the different installers you have so Windows Mac Android iOS Linux FreeBSD and Nas there is this analogy qnap Western Digital installer but there's others as well in fact there is an unraid Docker image but what I'm going to do is actually swipe over to my blue iris machine so I'm going to minimize Blue Iris for a moment after I've installed the zero to your client which goes really quickly if I click on the tray here you should see Zero tier one now if I give that a single click I'll have these options so here's my node ID that's unique to each of these devices each computer I'm going to want to click join Network now in this box I'm going to put that network ID that was at the top of the page here's our Network Blue Iris test we're going to copy this go back over to the blue iris machine we're going to paste it here I'm going to allow default allow Global allow DNS and allow manage I'm going to allow everything and I'm going to click join when you join to a zero tier Network it actually puts a virtual network interface on your computer so in this case on a Windows machine I'm going to hit yes if I go over to my networks and I click on change adapter settings so here's my network interface card that I have ethernet plugged into and now here's my zero tier Network so it's like I have two network interface cards on this computer so let's close out of that close out of this and let's jump back over to zero tier here's the blue iris machine says it's online behind this notepad is my public IP address that it sees now this red dotted line means it's not authorized yet on my zero tier Network so how do I do that you click the check box it turns green and now it says online and shortly an IP address will show up here because it will be handed out on that network card an IP address there you go and it even shows the version of the client okay our first device is now joined to our zero tier Network let's swipe back over to our Blue Iris machine we'll open up blue iris and we're actually going to close the program this way the program sees that new network card so we're going to do yes we're going to close it and then we're going to reopen it so once blue iris is open you're going to click on the gear icon so you're going to click on web server normally you'll have your external address your Wan address here and your internal address here and these should look pretty familiar but you'll notice adapters and now when you click this drop down you should see an additional adapter now this is the IP address of your zero tier Network this is the IP that's been assigned to this blue iris machine so if I click that you'll notice that it still adds the port to it and if I click ok now blue iris the blue iris web server is on that zero tier IP address the cameras themselves are still connected to the regular 192 168 IP address but the web server itself is on a different network adapter your zero tier network is now set up your blue iris machine is now added to it and blue iris the web server and blue iris is connected to zero tear so what's left well now your devices that you want to be able to connect remotely from need to have zero tier on them as well and be on the network grab your iPhone or Android phone or iPad or MacBook or whatever you have and download the zero to your client the app is really simple to navigate you're just going to hit the plus sign in the upper right hand corner accept the terms of service you're going to enter that same network ID that we see at the top of the page in the zero tier dashboard we're going to enable default route we'll use Network DNS and we'll click add Network now it's going to pop up and say zero tier would like to add VPN connections we're going to hit allow It'll ask for your PIN so you'll see your network there you'll just have to hit the toggle switch and the device will connect but remember there's one more thing we have to do we have to go accept this connection on our dashboard so we're back over on the computer now and you'll see I have the red dotted line so we're going to hit the check mark and in just a second it'll be issued in IP in the same network as our Blue Iris machine and there we go 192.168.193.185 this one's 102. so now my phone and the blue iris PC are on the same virtual private Network now you might say well what happens when I leave the house or the firewall is not going to let that connection in this is where the secret sauce of zero tier happens where that blue iris PC is talking to the beacon my phone is now talking to the beacon and then they're going to figure out how to communicate outside of the confines of a firewall and getting traffic in and out of it but there's one more thing you have to do in the blue iris app on your device before we can view our cameras so let's open up the blue iris app and click edit now what's there is going to be a lan IP and when IP okay so now that we're connected and our Blue Iris PC is connected and our app has all the correct information in it let's open back up blue iris and we should see our cameras there we are no open ports on the firewall no client VPN so double Nat or Carrier grade Nat or any weird situations it'll get through and we're able to see our cameras and it's good quality perfect quality so if you found this helpful give me a thumbs up like I said if you have questions leave them in the comments below excited to hear what you guys think of this and lastly if you like this kind of content subscribe to the channel we do lots of blue iris videos tutorials so with that said we will see in the next video take care

Channel: Learn Blue Iris

Views: 32,019

Keywords: zerotier, blue iris, blue iris security camera software, blue iris port forward, blue iris cgnat, blue iris starlink, blue iris WAN IP

Id: w9rC8HN2Umc

Length: 12min 58sec (778 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 28 2022