Raspberry Pi Dongle Port Forward

I have been using Node Red foe 3 years to automate my home but still consider myself a Noob as most of my work has just copied others. I am now running Node Red on a Raspberry Pi 3 to monitor my motorhome (yes i am over 60). The Pi is set up as an access point to connect to other IOT devices without internet. I have added an old 3G dongle to allow status message to my phone via the Telegram app. This does 90% of what I need however, it would be useful to access the dashboard remotely. On my home automation system I use port forwarding. How do I access my pi connecting via a dongle. For information, the dongle is a ZTE MF730 using a GiffGaff PAYG sim card.

Most cellular companies will have you NAT'd so you might find it wont work the way you are talking

you might be able to get a VPN service and meet in the middle so to speak

I suspect you would be able to use ngrok.

The solution...
You send a telegram message to your pi bot /ngrok ui then your flow starts ngrok and send you the URL in a telegram reply. Click that link & access your dashboard. When you are done, send /ngrok stop

Notes:

  • be sure to add username and password to your node-red
  • be sure to use https when setting up ngrok connection.

If the requirement is to be able to access it remotely, but from your local network (rather than from the phone when fully mobile) then an alternative is to use a cloud MQTT broker and copy everything you need for the dashboard to (and from) topics there. You can use mosquitto MQTT bridging for that.
Then modify your dashboard so that interfaces only with mqtt topics, on the local mosquitto. Those will all be duplicated on the remote one.
Finally run node-red on your laptop or PC and run an exact copy of the dashboard nodes, but configure the mqtt broker to access the cloud server, and it should just go.

Thanks for all the replies. I will give them a try.

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