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Some additional information:

I phoned my ISP and they confirmed the ports should not be blocked.

I do use a VPN which it occured to me may be the problem. I do not have time to try it now, but at some stage will disable it and check.

Hi

I have a Netgear Nighthawk router with dd-wrt.

I have opened up a couple of ports on my router which I have NATed to point to a web server running on a machine in my LAN and registered a domain name with a domain name provider so I can access using a domain.

The web server is accessible from my own network and also it seems to an external network which is using my ISP (at least I can accesss it using one of my neighbours network which uses the same ISP as me).

However when I try to accesss my LAN from an external network not using my ISP theree is no access - messages get sent, but there are never any replies, so it appears to be completely blocked. I cannot even ping my router's (WAN) IP address (I have opened up ping on my router).
(nslookup does correctly resolve the ip address of my router from the domain name)

Does anyone have any idea what might be blocking eccess from external networks ?
And can anyone tell me how I might go about determining why and where access is blocked ?
(I do have a neighbour either side whose networks (one using a different ISP, the other using the same ISP as me) from which I can run tests ).

Hi

Thank you very much for your reply and apologies for not acknowledging earlier, I had thought there were no replies on this.

That gives me a good top level starting point.

So ignoring ddns for now in my current setup, where my pihole points to my VPN suppliers DNS, how would dns look up from my LAN for an external DN look ? I'm thinking something like:
-> Pihole -> my (NordVPN) DNS -> ISP DNS direct ? or forwarded to DNS hierarchy? -> resolution
Not sure if the NordVPN DNS 'knows' my ISPs DNS directly (possibly something in the client config?) or whether it simply forwards the query on to what ever set of servers it uses)
?

I have now registered a DN with an external supplier (GoDaddy) whose A-Record I have pointed (for now) directly at the WAN ip address of the router.
(I have also set up port forwarding for access to a test web server on a local device and can now access that (well at least from my neighbours network) using my registerd DN). 

So accessing from an external network dn look up would go something like:
<type in my DNS> -> GoDaddy DNS -> resolved to my router WAN address (via the DN A-Record I have set)

Would that be about correct ?

I believe the actual set up I am looking for will require changes which is really a question for a separate post, but as a side point, if I set my pihole to point directly to my godaddy DNS do you know if DN lookup queries from my LAN should still work ? Or is there something about using a vpn (for example DN queries are also encrypted) that requires me to send DN lookups via the VPNs DNS ?

Hi

I have a home setup which uses a dd-wrt router hooked up via pihole dns which sends traffic over a vpn.
I have set things up such that I can access the web server from an external site using my WAN ip address (or the DN url I get by doing nslookup on that adddress)

I'd now like to be able to access a web server running on my local LAN using a DN, but am struggling to understand how this would work and what information I need to do this

I was wondering if anyone might be able to clarify first how this fits into the network infrastructure and second what information I need to give to the DN and DDNS providers to set it up.

From my searches as I understand it the setup should work something like this:
When a request for your DN (the external DN you registered with the DN hosting company) is made from an external network it is sent to the local DNS which sends it down the DNS hierarchy until your local (in my case my ISP DNS) receives the request.
This then forwards it to the DDNS server (that you registered with), which maps it to the WAN ip address of your router and sends the information back to the DNS. The DNS then knows the ip address to route to and the request is received at the WAN side of the router.

There is a DDNS client running on the router which continuously feeds the DDNS server with information about the ip address for the domain, so if the ISP changes the WAN IP the DDNS knows about it and things continue to carry on working (the home DN is still mapped to the correct ip address)

Is that roughly correct ?

Given that is the case:
How does the my ISP DNS know which DDNS server (i.e the DDNS I have registered with) to forward it's request to ?
What information do I need to provide to the DDNS service provider ? just the domain name I buy from the DN provider ?
Do I need to provide any DDNS information when I register the domain name for my host network ?
Is it important which I do first - register the domain name or register with a DDNS service ?
Given my router uses pihole for DNS should my DDNS client be running on the router or on pihole or does it not matter ?