VPN connection for Home Assistant to avoid ISP port blocking

Configuration
1

Hi
I have a very weird problem.
I am trying to setup the HAC integration for my Kia car. However, the Kia server requires a connection the be established on port 8080. I starting to believe that my ISP is blocking port 8080 for outgoing traffic.

This is what I have tried:

  1. Normal connection through router: failed
  2. Putting Home Assistant IP in DMZ: failed
  3. Connection on my mobile phone as hotspot, i.e. mobile data: success
  4. Added VPN (through a VPN service provider) on all traffic in my router: success

My conclusion is that then I connect via my ISP and even when I remove the router from the equation the connection fails. When I avoid my ISP, either via another ISP (mobile data) or through VPN it works.
I get the same result with the Kia App on my mobile phone. When I connect via Wifi it fails, when I connect directly on mobile data it works.

I have tried the Tailscale and Wireguard addon, but no success. It seems that all VPN solutions is to create a secure connection to HomeAssistant, no the use case i need: Tunnel past my ISP for outgoing traffic.

Any ideas?

I dont want to have all traffic on my router through VPN, even if that solves my problem, its not a good solution. I could try changing ISP, but that is a big hassle…

2

Try to look in the router setup if you can.
Sometimes port 8080 is assigned for other stuff already, like a proxy or even a configuration page.
That assignment will sometimes wreck havoc.

And a VPN service on HA is not a solution, since you can not make the Kia server use the VPN.
You could use a VPN service on another site, but it is important that it take all the traffic and not just the typical browsing protocols.

3

I have already removed the router from the equation, it is not the problem.
A VPN connection (through a VPN service) will tunnel past my ISP filtering, so yes that is one solution, since I have already tried it on my router, but I dont want all my traffic to go through a VPN, hence I am looking for a solution only on HA.

4

You probably have to look into routing then, so you can route only the Kia traffic over the VPN.