How am I streaming WITHOUT using a VPN?

VPN
1

Solved: it’s because I’m also port forwarding. I didn’t mention that because I thought you had to do that. I will be disabling port forwarding.

Tl;dr I’m streaming without a VPN. Did I miss understand what the point of the VPN was or I’m I doing something that shouldn’t be happening?

I just found out about audiobookshelf on Friday, and downloaded it on Saturday. I am at work right now, so first time off of my home network, and I am streaming an audiobook from home, but I’m not using a VPN. How am I streaming right now?

All the posts I’ve seen say the only way to stream is if you VPN into you home network. Well I don’t usually like streaming and prefer to download stuff to my phone so I didn’t bother getting tailscale like everyone suggests. But out of curiosity I wanted to see what would happen if I tried to stream anyways and well, I’m listening to a book right now that is not downloaded to my phone. I’ve tried with several books and they all work. Including an accompanying PDF with one of the books.

2

Either you’re still on your home network or your home network is open to the internet.

3

Are you doing port forwarding on your router? What are you putting in the url bar when you are outside of your network?

Personally I don’t use a VPN either. But I use a combination of DDNS and NGINIX to the push the traffic to my needed service.

4

i use a cloudflare tunnel for ABS. no open router ports necessary

5

Are you using an app or browser? Whatever you’re pointing at with either is accepting the connection… most likely dangerous if not intentional.

6

You port forwarded the port for abs thus exposing it to the internet, that’s how you can connect.

I would highly suggest that you reverse that. Use Tailscale or cloudflare or some other form of zero trust vpn.

7

Well isn’t that a terrifying possibility.

8

The tutorial I followed did have me port forward 13387. I think that was the number.

9

The app. I’m also port forwarding. I didn’t mention that because I thought you had to do that.

10

Thanks for the advice. I will be disabling the port forwarding.

11

That will work till you are assigned a new IP address.

As others have said a common set up without a VPN is a dynamic dns like duck DNS.
And a reverse proxy from nginx.

It enables you to be accessible outside your network without opening up ports

(This is a free option)

12

Port forwarding isn’t bad per se but isn’t the best security practice and using something like cloudflare zero trust would be good but you will have to purchase a domain name.