Should Swiss gateways somehow connect to SWITCH directly?

Gateways
1

When setting up a gateway in Australia and following the Server Addresses page on the Wiki to connect it to router.au.thethings.network, (today) one is actually connecting to thethings.meshed.com.au:

$ host router.au.thethings.network
router.au.thethings.network is an alias for thethings.meshed.com.au.
thethings.meshed.com.au has address 52.62.83.250

Nice.

However, for Switzerland the Wiki suggests router.eu.thethings.network (which today is an alias for bridge.eu.thethings.network).

So: could/should one configure a Swiss gateway to somehow connect to SWITCH instead? Or is that “bridge” taking care of that?

2

In general you can choose which router to use, the console usually gives a suggestion based on the selected frequency plan, but in the end you have to decide yourself. The console suggestions should be regions operated by The Things Network foundation, but as the latency between Australia and our TTNF-operated Asia-Southeast region is often too high, we decided to redirect our AU address to Meshed.

If you’re in Switzerland, you can choose to use the SWITCH-operated region, but you don’t have to.

3

Since i cannot find any hints about “switch-router” and cannot connect: Is there a possibility that this simply has no clearance yet for production?

4

You can either register a gateway on switch-router using the Open Network Infrastructure/Switch Console (available here) or using ttnctl:

$ ttnctl gateways register --router-id switch-router my-gateway-on-switch-router EU_863_870
  INFO Registered Gateway                       Gateway ID=my-gateway-on-switch-router
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5

Hello there. Since yesterday, I am trying to register my new gateway to switch-router, however I couldn’t get it working. I got countless messages saying ERROR: [TTN] Connection to server "ttn.opennetworkinfrastructure.org" failed, retry in 30 seconds
I even deleted the gateway from the TTN console and re-added it using the Open Network Infrastructure/Switch Console as you suggested. The one thing I did not yet try is the ttnctl command. Using ttn-router-eu seems work though as far as the connection goes.
Is the SWITCH TTN router really operational? Or am I doing something wrong? I’m a total newbie in terms of LoRa/TTN…
Thanks for any help!

6

Hi @mc-404!

The switch-router is fully operational, I have a few gateways connected to it as we speak, so I guess there’s a configuration issue.

Which gateway do you have? Is it an IMST ic880a? What’s the install procedure and configuration so far?

Cheers

7

btw, it was only on April 12th that we officially announced the existence of it; although it’s been running for quite a while. Check here for the announcement: https://opennetworkinfrastructure.org/post/switch/

8

If you’re using an MQTT-based packet forwarder (such as the MP packet forwarder), you’ll want to set the server address to ttn.opennetworkinfrastructure.org:1882. Indeed, the MQTT broker for gateways is set on port 1882 for the Switch router, whereas on TTN Foundation-regions, it is by default set to 1883.

9

Hi @gonzalo! Thanks a lot for your reply. The gateway is a Multitech Conduit AEP (outdoor model) running firmware version 1.4.16. I followed the configuration steps here:
https://www.thethingsnetwork.org/docs/gateways/multitech/aep.html
If I select another router and restart the forwarder, no errors regarding the router are logged. There’s also another problem that any LoRa packets that are received seem to fail CRC, but that’s probably something for a separate topic.

10

Update: It appears that the connection as such is successful, since the gateway is reported as “connected” in the console. However I still get the ERROR: [TTN] Connection to server "ttn.opennetworkinfrastructure.org" failed, retry in 480 seconds messages every 8 minutes. If that’s nothing to worry about, I can live with it.

11

Oh! That’s good to hear, but I wonder what the other message is. Perhaps the Multitechs connect a second thread to a different port for some other purpose? Maybe you can monitor outgoing connections to see which port is the one that’s failing…

@kersing: perhaps you know more about it, since you worked quite a lot with Multitechs?

1 Like
12

Is it still connected? And is the ‘last seen’ a value < 1 minute?

I just committed a fix to the installer script that should solve this. If your gateway is no listed active or the last seen value is far beyond 1 minute you should run the new installer. Reply ‘Yes’ when asked to ‘… update configuration?’.

3 Likes
13

Yes, it was/is still connected, with the ‘last seen’ value counting up to a couple of seconds and jumping back to zero. So everything as it should be, I suppose :slight_smile:

I downloaded and ran your updated script a couple of minutes ago. No errors were logged anymore, instead I see:
13:07:26 INFO: [TTN] ttn.opennetworkinfrastructure.org RTT 6
13:07:26 INFO: [TTN] send status success for ttn.opennetworkinfrastructure.org
So that seems to be resolved - thank you very much for your premier support! Now I should probably go and get a heap of sensors to make use of the shiny new gateway.
Have a great day, and thanks again!

2 Likes