[Android Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] DroidBurgundy:
I have a grandfathered Unlimited Verizon Data Plan that my company is paying me to have. I do not like Verizon, and am out of contract, so I recently purchased a Nexus 5 and plan on paying monthly with Ting. I have to maintain a "company phone" but using Google Voice, and importing all my accounts, it is really trivial that I would be using the Nexus 5 on a different carrier, since they only subsidize their employees, the device does not actually belong to them.

Instead of leaving my GS3 in a shoe box somewhere or selling it, I wanted to try using it as a dedicated hotspot for my apartment since I live in an area that has capped data from ISP's and no real solution (read FIOS) yet.

I purchased a Netgear Wireless Bridge Adapter WNCE2001 and set it up to connect to the phone's wifi hotspot and plugged that into the WAN "internet" port of my router running Tomato 1.28 firmware.

All seemed ok as far as ability to surf the web, use netflix from my TV, etc however there was a huge problem with some of the things I host from my internal network, such as media servers Subsonic, and Plex.

I am not able to access anything hosted on my internal network from any external network, even though I have not touched or altered my configurations - just replaced the WAN / "internet" port of my router with the tethered data connection. :(

After days of research and reading I have attempted a few fixes, although none have truly worked so far:

1) I tried connecting the phone to an open VPN server and then routing that traffic through the built in wifi tethering . This indeed worked - I followed some threads linked below, and was able to verify that now everything on my network was using the Open VPN connection - however I could not figure out a way to forward the ports appropriately and access Subsonic or Plex from the outside world.

http://xdaforums.com/showthread.php?t=1993689

http://xdaforums.com/showthread.php?t=2317841

2) I attempted using SSH tunnel from a remote Linux Server and although I could verify tha the tunnel was getting data piped through, I could not actually access Subsonic or PLex from the outside world. I tried to use tsocks to force all traffic for each service to use an established SSH tunnel but did not have much success.

It is important to note that these methods were tested on a shared server of a friend of mines, as far as I know they do not have root access and can not alter the open VPN or Open SSH configs or manually open ports on the server side. I wanted to just test it out to verify that it could work because I do not have a dedi or vps at the moment, I would consider getting something small from digital ocean or Amazon EC2 if this could actually work.

3) Lastly, I tried to use this port forwarding app, which as far as I can tell did absolutely nothing :(

Any help or direction is much appreciated, at this point I am more frustrated because after hours of reading and trying things out I feel as though I am now even more confused as to why this isn't / can't / could be working?!?!

Another thread I found here that seems like maybe it could be similar is the ability of getting NAT free with XBL using tethered data. I dont play video games, but I am wondering if something similar could be done using a crossover cable to allow for opening up ports through the wireless ISP as well? The older computer I use to host my media stuff from is running Ubuntu, and I have a Macbook Laptop, I only run Win7/8 in VM's on occasion - ideally though I want to find a solution that only uses the Linux Laptop, the phone, and the router - I can't leave my laptop home.

TLDR;

Halp! :silly:

[old desktop]- - - - ->{ROUTER]- - - - - >[WIFI ADAPTER]- - - ->[TETHERED GS3]- - - >[VZW]- - -> INTERNETS :good:

How to I send media servers from one side to the other and avoid all the NATing and dynamic IP's ? :victory: