I have put a SIM card into my 7258 gateway and it connects to the internet since I am capable of receiven packets in my LoRaWAN server, yet I don’t know how to access to the gateway.
I have tried to put the ip that appears (by accessing through WiFi at the same time it has LTE connection) yet there is no way to access without using the local ip assigned by the wifi router.
Could you please tell me how to access settings of the gateway when it is only connected to LTE?
Hello Vladislav,
First of all, thanks for your answer. Can you please notify me when this happen together with instructions on how to do it? It would be great if you do that.
Sure, just in case check by end of next week. I hope we have something for you by than. I hope I don’t forget to notify you. We will think of some king of notification for the new firmware. Perhaps a newsletter would be good.
The first question seems to be asking for a way to access settings when the gateway has only an LTE connection. If you are actually right next to the box while it is on LTE, running its internal wifi in access point mode would work for local access to the settings, but not for remote administration.
For remote administration, generally speaking mobile networks do not allow inbound traffic (though there are sometimes special offerings). So what is usually done is to have a daemon make an outbound connection to a cloud server which forwards a port back. “ngrok” is a commercial offering of such a service but might not literally work in this case. Using openwrt scripting I have a solution mostly working. I don’t think this is a stock feature, though it would be a good one - and of course it needs a cloud server to function at the “jump host”.
The next major question is if the RAK7258 in the newest question is actually the LTE model. All models have the SIM slot, but only some have the LTE modem soldered to the board underneath the LoRa card. If it isn’t an LTE model, it is possible to connect an external LTE card to the USB port, but I don’t know if the stock software would support this. We needed a very specific LTE card so have gotten this working by rebuilding openwrt with chat as well as ppp and copying over the chat & ppp scripts we worked out on a larger system in order to run it.
A simpler solution could be to connect the gateway to a mobile access point by Ethernet.
For a portable demo, the simplest of all may be to tether it via wifi to your phone.
(Beware that some hotels and conference venues go to efforts (often illegally) to block the use of the personal access points, in order to charge high fees for access to their in-house network. Where this is done by attacking foreign wifi networks, an Ethernet linked AP would be workaround)
Hi Hobo,
Is there a solution now for remote access into LTE versions of this gateway?
Can you please give me some instructions. We have quite a few of those gateways and also the external version. Working great but we need remote access capabilities.
Thanks
I’m not 100% sure if it will work on the factory build and don’t have specific instructions, but on a proof-of-concept basis we’ve used an OpenWRT procd init script with the OpenWRT-default dropbear ssh client to create an SSH tunnel to a bastion server in the cloud through which we can connect back down.
That’s mostly for command line tasks though in theory you could forward whatever ports the web configuration interface needs instead.
Yes I can see the gateway has 3 openvpn options in a tab but I am not familiar with that. My understanding is that I need to have an openvpn server and register the gateway on this network with the client vpn option. This is still very vague to me. Would you be able to shed some lights for me?
Do you have evidence this is going to work on OpenWRT, and RAK’s build in particular ?
If so, great - it’s just that its a very different and more limited flavor of Linux than contemplated by that script, with a completely different concept of package management.
Ok thanks @pauldeng That install script is awesome and a lot simpler.
I got that working. I have a client file with .ovpn extension. Just tried using an android openvpn client and it works well. I can connect to the server and when asking google about my ip , I get the one from the server. Cool.
Now I believe I need to get this client file to be used by the rak gateway and have a fixed local ip address assigned to this client. This way I can connect with my laptop using another openvpn client and get to the gateway by accessing the web console using this fixed local ip.
Is that how it would work?
And how do you tell the open vpn client to assign itself a static ip?
Procedure above works fine to get the VPN working. I can now access the gateway remotely on the vpn ip address.
But as soon as I activate the VPN on the gateway, the lorawan server does not receive anything from the gateway. Not sure what could be the issue gateway firewall rules? lorawan server firewall rules?
Is there a way to keep the gateway using a normal connection for the udp packer forwarder on port 1700 and use openvpn for therest? I don’t think it is a good idea but I would like to get openvpn working and having the lorawan traffic not go through the vpn server. The vpn server is just there so the gateway admin can be accessed remotely.