NAT Loopback issues
When setting up your Nomadesk Private Appliance, you might encounter a situation where your chosen domain name resolves correctly to your public IP, but connections from inside your local network (LAN) fail.
This is often caused by something called NAT loopback (also known as hairpin NAT or NAT reflection).
What is NAT Loopback?
Normally, your router lets devices on your local network reach the Internet by translating their private IP addresses (like 192.168.x.x) into your public IP address.
But what happens if a device inside your LAN tries to connect to your public domain name (which points back to your public IP)?
On some routers, this works fine. The router "loops" the traffic back into the LAN to the correct device. On others, the router drops the request, and the connection fails.
This is the NAT loopback problem: your domain works fine from outside your network, but not from inside.
How to fix NAT Loopback issues
1. Enable NAT Loopback on your router
If you are able to modify your router settings and have some networking knowledge, you could set up NAT Loopback on your router.
Some routers do not have the ability to adjust this setting, so this is not the best option for everyone.
If a lot of traffic is generated to the appliance extra load will be put on your router as all traffic needs to pass through it
2. Add a rule to your DNS server
If you have a custom internal dns server deployed, you can add a custom rule for your domain.
Example: If your appliances LAN IP is 192.168.1.10 and your domain is example.domain.com, add a rule linking that ip to that domain name.