How can I set a static IP on my IoT device and have if work on any network automatically - networking

Question

I'm building a home IoT device and I can't figure out a way of setting a static IP which would work on any network. I want to be able to ship this device to anyone having previously set a static IP and all they would have to do is connect to the internet and be good to go.
Any help is appreciated!

Answer 1

Consider using Teredo(Miredo in OpenSource world). Following is an excerpt copied shamelessly from Wikipedia.
In computer networking, Teredo is a transition technology that gives full IPv6 connectivity for IPv6-capable hosts that are on the IPv4 Internet but have no native connection to an IPv6 network. Unlike similar protocols, it can perform its function even from behind network address translation (NAT) devices such as home routers.
You can let your customers to configure the robot like a normal IoT device. Once the device is up and running, it will automatically connect to relay server and get an IPv6 address. This IPv6 address can be static or dynamic, updated to your server without using any third party.
This will give you seamless bi-directional connectivity between your server and robot(s) without resorting to port forwarding. You may have to address the security concerns by restricting the access to IPv6 address using PKI infrastructure.
Checkout Miredo at https://www.remlab.net/miredo/. You can even consider setting up your own Miredo server/relay.

Answer 2

the gateway IP of home routers changes constantly. this is why there is No-IP, DynDNS,... and similar services . this is also a common working solution. your customers need a dynaemic DNS provider or a similar service. This is also a common solution for scurity cameras. Another possibility is that the RPi sends the information to a cloud or another storage outside of the network and the app has access to this cloud. however this could be problematic because of privacy...
http://www.noip.com/support/knowledgebase/using-security-camera-systems-with-no-ip/
http://www.networkcameracritic.com/?p=124
the problem is that you want the external or WAN IP to be static like that of google or other big companies. This is very expensive and not every Internet Service Provider has this service. Another problem is that the IP of a smartphone on that the app runs also changes constantly.
Maybe the accepted answer in this link is useful http://www.superuser.com/questions/778640/do-you-need-a-static-ip-address-to-setup-a-webserver

Answer 3

Why do you need a static IP? I assume you want to open ports on the device and then have users to connect to it.
If that is the case: Simply do not do it! Its a major security problem.
Why?
Having all ports closed provides zero attack surface. If you open ports to the Internet, IoT device search engines will find this and try to attack it. And even if you protocol is secure today and even if users use secure passwords, how can you guarantee this in 5 years?
Instead open a connection from the device to a server, and let the users connect to the server. This allows central protection, monitoring (IDS) and security updates.

Answer 4

Here is an update in case anyone is having the same issue. I ended up using node package ip to update each robot's ip in my database. Each client then pulls the ip from the DB to connect.
Here is a snippet of my code. The server is fired on boot.
var ip = require('ip');
var mongo = require('mongodb')
var MongoClient = mongo.MongoClient
var url = 'your_url'
var name = "example"
function updateIP() { // update ip if need be
var my_ip = ip.address()
console.log(my_ip)
MongoClient.connect(url, function(err, db){
console.log(err)
var robots = db.collection('robots')
robots.findAndModify(
{name: name},
[['name', 1]],
{$set: {ip: my_ip}},
{update: true})
})
}