remote connection

[martol 0]

Hi everyone, i have a couple of problems / issues whatever you want to call them. i have recently purchased a CJ1MCPU12-ETN21 and a NS8-TV01B-V2, i have set them up quite easily on our LAN but now i want to be able to speak to both remotely (i.e sat at home having a few beers.) NS8 i have changed the port number to one above 49152 as it says in manual and set up our router to accept incoming traffic on this number, both TCP and UDP but no connection. PLC default port number is 9600 so again i have set rules in our router to accept, do i have to put our routers ip address in routing table or our WAN ip. getting a bit of stick from MD as i told him i would have it set up this week, so any help would be welcomed.

[Jay Anthony 118]

It's in the download section on this forum: Internet Access Omron PLCs @ MrPLC.com

[PMCR 66]

martol The PLC should be fairly straight forward to setup for internet access. Lets assume you are using UDP 9600. 1. Forward UDP port 9600 to the PLCs IP address in the router. For my Linksys router, this looks as follows: 2. In the PLC setup, specify the LAN port of the router as the 'default gateway'. For me, this is 192.168.1.100 3. When you connect from outside the LAN, specify the WAN IP address in CX Programmer. The address below is a ficticious address, so it will not connect to a PLC. Lets get the PLC connected first. This is the easier of the 2 setups. The NS is much trickier, and in some cases cannot be accessed remotely.

[René Heijma 1]

Forwarding ports is a solution but another possibility is to use a VPN's I used a VPN-connection to a router to gain access to a CJ1 over port 9600. Gives you a bit more security and setting up in the CJ1 is easier. No gateways to setup. However the router must support VPN-connections. And I like Jay's explanation. Good document.

[PMCR 66]

René I have also used this method for customers to access their equipment remotely. When the IT department at the site can set it up properly, it works very well. On the PC side, do you use built in Windows VPN connections or a seperate VPN client? We have several customers who have VPN access to remote customer sites, but many times the IP address that they get assigned via VPN is on a different segment than the PLC or NS. Last week customer had 192.168.1.x for PLC / NS at the site, but VPN gave him 192.168.5.x. Still need 'default gateway' in PLC to hop through the router.

[René Heijma 1]

I know but it totally depends on how the router is set up how it should assign IP-addresses. For a small network you will probably be in the same subnet. For a bigger site with a IT-department I agree you will run into these issues.

[martol 0]

Thanks for the info guys, worked a treat for connecting to the PLC from home. Download from Jay is a great paper. i only use port forwarding because i have no experience of using other methods (VPN). I could now do with connecting to my NS8 screen overthe internet, any ideas? PMCR why do you say that in some cases it cannot be accessed remotely.

[PMCR 66]

The NS does not have the ability to determine a path back to the remote computer. To program over the web (using Ethernet), the NS must be programmed with the IP address of the remote router (ie your home router). In many cases, this is not practical, as the programmer may be moving from site to site (or hotel to hotel), or the IP address of the remote router may not be static. The only other way to program the NS over the web (without using VPN, which is the best way), is to add a serial cable from the PLC to the NS, and program the NS through the serial connection to the PLC. The downside to this is that it is VERY SLOW. It can take 1 hour to download a medium sized application.

[martol 0]

Surely it is possible to add the port number of the NS screen to the factory router(port forwarding) and as long as the factory router has a static WAN IP i should be able to connect to it, which is the same way as i connect to the PLC. I can connect to the screen over LAN by entering the IP address of the screen followed by new port number i have entered(default is port 80), so by entering this infomation in our router(which has a static WAN IP) and opening the port i should be able to connect remotely. But i can't! what am i doing wrong?

[PMCR 66]

What you are seeing is the difference between the ETN21 and the NS in terms of Ethernet. The ETN21 has the ability to 'remember' the IP address of each remote FINS node, when using the 'AUTO:DYNAMIC' FINS to IP conversion. The NS does not have this capability. That is why it is necessary to program the IP address of the remote router (ie home, hotel, etc) in the NS to allow remote programming. The NS behaves like an ETN11, as opposed to an ETN21. The ETN11 had the same limitation. Another way that I have handled this issue when many NS and PLCs are in 1 facility is to have 1 PLC with 2 ETN21 cards. One ETN is connected to the router, and all Internet traffic (for programming the PLC or the NS) goes through this ETN card. The other ETN card is on an Ethernet network with all the other PLCs/ NSs. This is one reason that Omron supports loading new screens through a CF card. This is easy for someone in the plant to do.