Without a secondary internet connection this isn’t possible.

The router is the connection - its the gateway (a term we don’t hear much these days).

You could setup an independent connection via a cell modem - becoming a secondary connection. This is common for remote locations or even small businesses that need a failover just for management.

You could even have it on a single machine and have a vpn there. Then you could RDP/VNC to that one machine and manage things from there. I’ve done the VPN this way with Tailscale. One machine has it (I’ve even done it with a Raspberry Pi), then you can RDP/VNC to other machines from there.

But there’s not much I could see you doing if the gateway is down anyway.

A jumpbox. Set up a VPS somewhere, have some remote hands at home set up a VPN client to connect to the VPS, and then you connect to the VPS as well.

Alternatively, is it possible that your ISP can remote config your router and set up the port forwarding again for you?

Not what you asked, but regardless of whatever else you’re doing, I would take any really critical data you need, encrypt it, put it on a laptop or other portable device, and bring it with you. Trying to throw together some last-minute setup that you rely on and can’t easily resolve remotely is asking for trouble.

Another fallback option, if you have a friend who you trust and can call and ask them to type stuff in – give 'em a key before you go and call 'em and ask 'em to type whatever you need if you get into trouble.

If the router reconnects to the internet when it factory resets and it still works as a gateway, there may still be hope. You’d need some SSH host on another machine behind the router; you’d probably also need some sort of minimal VPS. You could setup a reverse SSH tunnel on the SSH host that would tunnel through the router to the VPS, then you’d be able to connect through the VPS into your network.

Honestly tho, this is a lot of work and if time is tight you might just wanna roll to a store and buy whatever cheap router you can find to limp along til you get back.

Tailscale would work as another user said. You could run TOR too. I’ve got a TOR service that I can SSH into for “plan b” if my VPN is down. It doesn’t need port forwarding.

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:

11 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 12 acronyms.

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Chiming in to say: I’ve had issues in the past where the WiFi router was factory resetting itself and it turned out this can happen if the power supply isn’t powerful enough for the device. In this case, I think I had gotten the WiFi router 2nd hand from Goodwill or something, and the provided power supply fit in the port, and it had the same voltage, but was an amp underpowered, instead of being something like 12volts 3.5amps, the plug was supplying 12volts 2.5amps, and I guess everything was fine until the unit needed more power (likely from routing high amounts of traffic, or more WiFi units connected)

I had no idea factory resetting could be the result of something like this so I was at a loss for a while until I found the info online.

So: check to make sure that

1. The power supply matches what the unit is requiring, and if it is,

2. If you have another power plug that matches the barrel jack size, volts and amps, try using that one in case the power supply itself is going bad.

Some kind of time switch to make the router reboot at regular intervals. Then hope that this prevents the factory reset.

You could setup netbird on a jump server (VPS hosted somewhere) and have a machine inside your home network tunnel out to the netbird server, allowing reverse tunnel access inside of your network. Lowendbox has some good deals on VPS that would work well for this. This is what I do.

If you don’t want to pay for a VPS, you could use your laptop or whatever you’re going to use while traveling to be the netbird server. Use a DDNS service or just manually update a DNS record for a domain to point at your travel device IP and the home device should be able to tunnel out and make the connection to the netbird server on your travel device. Not a great long term solution, but would work in a pinch and domains are fairly cheap if you don’t have one already.

Netbird is pretty great for this type of thing and there are some good guides on YT for getting it up and running. You could even relay a reverse tunnel connection through a device inside your network to your homelab or the router.

Tailscale. Create an account, put the client on the LAN device, put the client on the remote device, log in on both, you’re done. It bypasses NAT, CGNAT, and the firewall through some UDP black magic fuckery. As long as the router allows outgoing connections, it will work.

If the factory resets cause the router to lose connection to the ISP, though, then nothing will work.

Netbird is EU-based and similar to Tailscale (and its fork Headscale).

In addition to Netbird, I also suggest Pangolin, pangolin.net it’s quite efficient at what it does but either way would work fine if you want to self host it.

@Flax_vert I don't get the hate of poet forwarding. Wireguard is very secure and if it doesn't get the handshake port just shoes as closed.