I have a VPN server running on my network. When I’m remote I can connect to the VPN and access all the resources within my network as if I was at my house.
That said - how come when I go to my.tablotv.com it just times out with some sort of connection refused error? I would have assumed it would have worked just as if I was at home.
What is likely happening is that your browser is sending the requests to my.tablotv.com outside of your VPN connection. Basically any network traffic that is not going into your home network through the VPN goes through the regular internet network connection.
Now since that is happening, the Tablo website is trying to connect to your Tablo through the internet and through your firewall. If you have not setup remote connect AND paired your device before leaving home you will not be able to connect at all.
Makes sense, but wouldn’t that defeat the purpose of a VPN? I also don’t think that it is doing that because I have a localhost website running inside my home network. I can get to that fine when remote and on the VPN.
Additionally when I do a “what’s my IP” check it gives me my home IP not my remote connection IP.
It really depends on what VPN you are using.
For example, for work we use Cisco AnyConnect. It will only route traffic destined to the office servers through the VPN, all other traffic gets routed through the local network connection and not the VPN. This stops us from surfing the internet through the VPN to the office then out to the real world. Saves a lot of bandwidth,
You could definitively find out by running a traceroute/tracert for my.tablotv.com and see what the path that it follows looks like.
tracert shows that the first hop is starting with my VPN server which is inside my home network.
You might have to use something like Wireshark or use F12 in Chrome to track where the traffic is going and redirecting.
There is definitely something in your setup blocking either the outgoing request to Tablo cloud servers or the return path to your device.
I used a TeamViewer access to be able to remotely connect to a system on my local network and from there go to my.tablotv.com when I needed to re-establish remote connectivity, and that worked o.k. A bit different, but along the same lines.
In case someone happens to stumble on this thread…it actually wasn’t anything to do with the VPN server itself. Well maybe in a way, maybe more like a network/bandwith issue.
I noticed that some other sites wouldn’t load either…random ones but mostly ones that I need to log into. Finally after googling for a few days I found the solution - the MTU for the VPN adapter (not on the VPN server) was set to high and causing sites to fail to load.
I set it to 1200 and like magic my.tablotv.com works now of course once connected via VPN.
I know your reply is almost 2 years old, but I just wanted to let you know that after days of trying to figure out why I couldn’t sync to my tablo from a previously unpaired device that was connect to my VPN, changing the MTU on my mac’s adapter (en1-wifi) in this case from 1500 to 1280 fixed the problem just liked you described. THANK YOU!
My home setup uses a fios quantum gateway router. I set-up port forwarding for my VPN server and for the tablo remote connect in the quantum firewall settings. I’m running OS X Server version 5.4 on an iMac with High Sierra 10.13.3. The VPN from OS X Server was set up and working perfectly, and my devices could connect to my VPN no problem. However, when I initially went into the tablo app with a previously unpaired iPad that was on LTE (not connected to my home-network) that was connected to my VPN , it would see the tablo on my home network but it would not sync. It would enter a loop of connecting and failing to sync. I tried a million different settings on the server and router before coming across your solution. On my mac, I went to system preferences–>network–>wifi adapter (that’s the internet adapter I use on my iMac)–>advanced—>Hardware tab–>configure set to manually and change MTU value from 1500 to 1280 (lowest possible on Mac). Then I turned my server off and my wifi off. Rebooted both and confirmed MTU had been changed on my adapter using ifconfig. Then I went back to my unsynced iPad, re-connected to my VPN, opened the tablo app, found the tablo on my home network, and synced. Low and behold it was successful this time. No more syncing loop! Such an easy solution for a complicated problem.
Long story short. If you have a similar VPN setup, change the MTU on your adapter to a lower value! 1280 worked for me.
Thank you.