Connecting external gateway / packet forwarders to the AEP

[Davy De Waele]

Hi,

I have a Conduit AEP running in Lora Server Mode. AFAIK, this runs a packet forwarder on the conduit as well as a lora server, capable of processing the messages upstream (via node-red / mqtt / ….) that came from the internal packet forwarder. This setup works great.

Now, I have a raspberry PI acting as a Lora gateway that’s running a packet forwarder. It is connected to TTN but I also wanted to forward the packets to the Conduit and its lora server.

So I tried configuring the Raspberry PI to forward its requests to the Conduit Lora Server, by providing the following info in the packet forwarder of the PI:

{
	"gateway_conf": {
		"gateway_ID": "B827EBFFFECBE31F",
                "servers": [ { "server_address": "router.eu.thethings.network", "serv_port_up": 1700, "serv_port_down": 1700, "serv_enabled": true },{ "server_address": "test.lorawan.server", "serv_port_up": 1680, "serv_port_down": 1680, "serv_enabled": true },{ "server_address": "multitech.lorawan.server", "serv_port_up": 1780, "serv_port_down": 1782, "serv_enabled": true } ],
		"ref_latitude": xxx,
		"ref_longitude": xxxx,
		"ref_altitude": x,
		"contact_email": "xxxxx",
		"description": "xxxx" 
	}
}

I was hoping the whatever RF packets the Raspberry PI receives, that it would forward those to the multitech conduit.

When I look at the packet forwarder logs on the PI, I see this :

Oct  7 13:36:57 ttn-gateway ttn-gateway[4880]: INFO: Successfully contacted server multitech.lorawan.server
Oct  7 13:36:57 ttn-gateway ttn-gateway[4880]: INFO: [main] Starting the concentrator
Oct  7 13:36:57 ttn-gateway ttn-gateway[4880]: INFO: [main] concentrator started, radio packets can now be received.
Oct  7 13:36:57 ttn-gateway ttn-gateway[4880]: INFO: [up] Thread activated for all servers.
Oct  7 13:36:57 ttn-gateway ttn-gateway[4880]: INFO: [down] Thread activated for all server router.eu.thethings.network
Oct  7 13:36:57 ttn-gateway ttn-gateway[4880]: INFO: [down] Thread activated for all server internal.lorawan.server
Oct  7 13:36:57 ttn-gateway ttn-gateway[4880]: INFO: [down] Thread activated for all server multitech.lorawan.server
Oct  7 13:36:57 ttn-gateway ttn-gateway[4880]: INFO: [down] for server internal.lorawan.server PULL_ACK received in 2 ms
Oct  7 13:36:57 ttn-gateway ttn-gateway[4880]: INFO: [down] for server router.eu.thethings.network PULL_ACK received in 38 ms
Oct  7 13:36:57 ttn-gateway ttn-gateway[4880]: INFO: [down] for server internal.lorawan.server PULL_ACK received in 3 ms
Oct  7 13:36:57 ttn-gateway ttn-gateway[4880]: INFO: [down] for server router.eu.thethings.network PULL_ACK received in 42 ms
Oct  7 13:36:57 ttn-gateway ttn-gateway[4880]: INFO: [down] for server internal.lorawan.server PULL_ACK received in 36 ms
Oct  7 13:36:57 ttn-gateway ttn-gateway[4880]: INFO: [down] for server router.eu.thethings.network PULL_ACK received in 40 ms

So it made the initial connection, but I have the impressive that there is no more communication after that.

Also on the Conduit logs, I only see the following logging that it has found its internal gateway, but not the Raspberry PI gateway.

11:46:39:701|TRACE| Gateway 00:80:00:00:a0:00:06:8b seen IP address 127.0.0.1:42463
11:46:49:900|TRACE| Parse downstream message 12 bytes
11:46:49:901|TRACE| Gateway 00:80:00:00:a0:00:06:8b seen IP address 127.0.0.1:42463
11:47:0:100|TRACE| Parse downstream message 12 bytes
11:47:0:101|TRACE| Gateway 00:80:00:00:a0:00:06:8b seen IP address 127.0.0.1:42463
11:47:10:300|TRACE| Parse downstream message 12 bytes
11:47:10:301|TRACE| Gateway 00:80:00:00:a0:00:06:8b seen IP address 127.0.0.1:42463

Is it a supported configuration to have external (non multitech) packet forwarders connect to a conduit AEP ?

[Jason Reiss]

This thread has details.

Lora network server

Also open firewall.

[Davy De Waele]

Thx. This seems to be what I was looking for. Is this an official MultiTech supported config option for AEP ? (I didn’t find it in the docs, and there’s also no toggle in the UI. At least not in my version).

[Jason Reiss]

It is experimental feature in current software.

Also connecting a gateway to multiple network servers may run into problems.
A device cannot join both via OTA and only one should be used for downlink.

[Author]

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