Easy way to test Produced / Consumed function

[a062549 5]

Just a comment that this whole issue has my eyes counter-rotating!!! GPRS cell modems can be pretty cantankerous. Sierra used to have a doc for using their Ravens with RSLinx. I'll look for it. As always, we all can learn from this adventure forum! Edited 14 May 2014 by a062549

[Michael Lloyd 85]

I used to think Sierra cell modems were black magic. I've configured so many of them that I'm only online with the modem for a couple of minutes tops. Same with port servers. Port forwarding is the key to simplifying connectivity, I also set the modem up for DHCP. I get two things by doing that, when I plug my laptop in while in the field, it serves me the correct IP address for connecting to the hardware and I always use a viable network address for our network for the hardware so that if/when we change the comm out to something that needs a router and direct connects our hardware to the company network I don't have to re-ip everything. We have so many devices out there that we had to start subnetting the IP addresses. I asked the IT dept about that when I first hired on and got the deer in the headlights look. Thankfully they hired a guy that saw the need. We have numerous subnets for use in our SCADA system now (over 100 address ranges). He started off with a mask of .240, which fit my needs perfectly, and gave me a lot of IP's for hardware in one subnet. For some reason he went to .224. His reasoning was "because I said so"... things got interesting from there. In the end that's what we settled on. He screwed up a subnet one time and I called him on it (politely actually). It took a solid week for him to see his mistake (I'm persistent, and the range that he gave me to use was garbage. Even the hardware was smart enough to know I couldn't use the range he gave me). We started getting along better after that. You know the scene in the Wizard of Oz where they discover the wizard isn't really a wizard :) That's kind of what we had going on back then. Subnetting an IP range isn't rocket science. There are websites galore that will do the work for you. It's not fun to do by hand but I've done it a few times. I have a spreadsheet now. Edited 16 May 2014 by Michael Lloyd

[Michael Lloyd 85]

On 5/10/2014 at 8:30 PM, Ken Roach said:

If it were me, I would use MSG instructions instead of Produced/Consumed Tags. The Produced/Consumed system is unlikely to work well across VPNs or a WAN, especially if there are cellular links involved.

Yup... resurrecting an old post...

I ended up using the Message block. It's easy and it's fast. To anyone else that may stumble across this post- If you are having problems with CLX to CLX messaging when the device or devices are "behind" a cell modem, make sure that you port forward 44818 AND 2222 to the IP address of the PLC. I added 2222 to a "problem child" site this morning and it's now answering message requests.

[a062549 5]

Thanks for the update!