TELTONIKA RUT240 onboard playing tricks?

[jakew009]

I'm interes in this subject for both boating and my business use, but why oh why is there so much jargon nonsense everyone pretends to understand, when truth is most folk don't have a clue ?

Smoke & mirrors & bullshit is great for business. When it comes to SIM cards / M2M etc, 99% of suppliers are nothing more than sales organisations reselling someone else's product (often multiple levels of resale).

They rely on the customer not really having a clue what they are buying and coming up with more and more elaborate pricing strategies to make it difficult to compare prices and easier to sting you for excess data charges.

 

[Hurricane]

How many SIM cards do you have? Our wholesale cost for a 100MB aggregated SIM roaming across all 4 UK networks is 66 pence no minimum term (I just looked it up). We couldn't put a static IP on it for that but you could have it on a private APN.
A public IP would waste half the allowance with people doing port scans against it...

SIM cards aren't core to our business but I got so cheesed off with the slimy M2M sim card sales companies I wasted an inordinate amount of time getting an agreement with a tier 1 network ourselves.

Interesting - Private APN is new to me and I hadn't thought about data being used by port scans.
Can you have an IPv4 Address on an APN?
Is APN limited to mobile operators?

 

[jakew009]

Interesting - Private APN is new to me and I hadn't thought about data being used by port scans.
Can you have an IPv4 Address on an APN?
Is APN limited to mobile operators?

APN is the access point name. Your phone / router connects to the mast, but then depending on which APN you connect to, your traffic will get routed to a totally different place.

So for instance, if you connect to Vodafone's public APN ('internet'), you will just get given a private IP and routed out to the internet via carrier grade NAT at the cheapest / easiest place for Vodafone.

However, you can pay Vodafone to set you up a 'private' APN, which mean when you connect to it, Vodafone will tunnel the connection back to your datacentre and let you handle the IP address assignment etc.

This means that you can give the SIM card a private IP address, but still be able to connect to it remotely (a bit like you can with a VPN).

You can also put a 'real' public IP on the actual SIM card, but that means anyone who for instance ping's your IP address is effectively using up your data allowance.

The clever thing about APNs is that you can get different networks (O2, Three etc) to also advertise your private APN, and then your SIM card an effectively 'roam' between the different operators networks, whilst keeping the same IP address.

In the US Verizon do a thing where if you put mw01.vzwstatic as the APN, you will get an IP address that locates you in the midwest. But ne01.vzwstatic will break you out onto the internet in the north east.

 

[Hurricane]

APN is the access point name. Your phone / router connects to the mast, but then depending on which APN you connect to, your traffic will get routed to a totally different place.

So for instance, if you connect to Vodafone's public APN ('internet'), you will just get given a private IP and routed out to the internet via carrier grade NAT at the cheapest / easiest place for Vodafone.

However, you can pay Vodafone to set you up a 'private' APN, which mean when you connect to it, Vodafone will tunnel the connection back to your datacentre and let you handle the IP address assignment etc.

This means that you can give the SIM card a private IP address, but still be able to connect to it remotely (a bit like you can with a VPN).

You can also put a 'real' public IP on the actual SIM card, but that means anyone who for instance ping's your IP address is effectively using up your data allowance.

The clever thing about APNs is that you can get different networks (O2, Three etc) to also advertise your private APN, and then your SIM card an effectively 'roam' between the different operators networks, whilst keeping the same IP address.

In the US Verizon do a thing where if you put mw01.vzwstatic as the APN, you will get an IP address that locates you in the midwest. But ne01.vzwstatic will break you out onto the internet in the north east.

Thanks for taking the time to post that.
Really interesting.
I've often had to enter an APN on a mobile phone to get it working but I didn't know what it meant.
All makes sense now.
Thanks

 

[superheat6k]

How many SIM cards do you have? Our wholesale cost for a 100MB aggregated SIM roaming across all 4 UK networks is 66 pence no minimum term (I just looked it up). We couldn't put a static IP on it for that but you could have it on a private APN.
A public IP would waste half the allowance with people doing port scans against it...

SIM cards aren't core to our business but I got so cheesed off with the slimy M2M sim card sales companies I wasted an inordinate amount of time getting an agreement with a tier 1 network ourselves.

Presently approximately 35 all fixed IP SIMs on an aggregated account whereby 100MB is costing us £7 per SIM per month, and on each a 24 month contract. Most are at least 2/3 through their contract period, but we are under pressure to reduce SIM fees we levy our clients.

We hook these to our water chiller controllers on sites across the UK, but mostly in central London. So we can monitor the chillers functions remotely. We like the RUT955 because it has the ability to accept an external digital (relay) input we use to send us a fault alert and fault reset email. This means we do not have to set the Router up to read the Bacnet or Modbus data from the controller, we just set up a simple spare On / Off relay, that the chiller controller switches when a fault occurs.

OK we don't use masses of data, but I think we are being fleeced on the basis we must use fixed IP SIMs. More recently the SIMs we use are multi network, which helps if a cell site goes down. So is there a way we can use a non fixed IP SIM and is there somewhere I can find an idiots guide on how we use them / set them up, and essentially what the jargon these devices use actually means . So if there is a way we can set up the RUT955 with a non fixed IP SIM via some of its numerous onboard capabilities e.g. VPN, I would be very grateful. Doing this will allow us to reduce the service cost and consequent fees to our clients and allow us to open up froM 35 SIMs to (hopefully) hundreds.

If someone knows a firm that could help us, and won't fleece us I am more than happy to move away from our current provider who insists only fixed IP will work for us. I would say that once set up an individual router isn't going anywhere, so not like it keep having to identify where it is - we know where it is.

I can then work out the benefits for fitting one of these on my boat.

 

[vas]

Trev,
should be straight forward to use just public IPs (assuming the provider is happy to offer that) and configure no-ip or another dynamic DNS service (for peanuts or free if you don't mind logging in every month and updating them...)
even on a private IP right now (idiots still haven't fixed my problem, called them again tonight, said they are working on it...) with ZerotierOne, I can log in to the router from my mobile or home pc .
both no-ip and zerotierOne are supported by Teltonika hence me mentioning them. Sure Jake can explain things much better.

V.

 

[Hurricane]

Presently approximately 35 all fixed IP SIMs on an aggregated account whereby 100MB is costing us £7 per SIM per month, and on each a 24 month contract. Most are at least 2/3 through their contract period, but we are under pressure to reduce SIM fees we levy our clients.

We hook these to our water chiller controllers on sites across the UK, but mostly in central London. So we can monitor the chillers functions remotely. We like the RUT955 because it has the ability to accept an external digital (relay) input we use to send us a fault alert and fault reset email. This means we do not have to set the Router up to read the Bacnet or Modbus data from the controller, we just set up a simple spare On / Off relay, that the chiller controller switches when a fault occurs.

OK we don't use masses of data, but I think we are being fleeced on the basis we must use fixed IP SIMs. More recently the SIMs we use are multi network, which helps if a cell site goes down. So is there a way we can use a non fixed IP SIM and is there somewhere I can find an idiots guide on how we use them / set them up, and essentially what the jargon these devices use actually means . So if there is a way we can set up the RUT955 with a non fixed IP SIM via some of its numerous onboard capabilities e.g. VPN, I would be very grateful. Doing this will allow us to reduce the service cost and consequent fees to our clients and allow us to open up froM 35 SIMs to (hopefully) hundreds.

If someone knows a firm that could help us, and won't fleece us I am more than happy to move away from our current provider who insists only fixed IP will work for us. I would say that once set up an individual router isn't going anywhere, so not like it keep having to identify where it is - we know where it is.

I can then work out the benefits for fitting one of these on my boat.

This probably doesn't help but I would probably have some downstream (IoT) hardware that wasn't dependent on a static address.
Move the inelegance away from the router and write some specific code within the IoT device.
Using that approach, you could have a lot of inelegance in the system.
Maybe not even use a router - just a simple internet connection.
The connection would be rather like the "add hoc" Wireguard remote connections that I have set up for my VPN

Sorry - this is all a bit off topic.

 

[jakew009]

Trev,
should be straight forward to use just public IPs (assuming the provider is happy to offer that) and configure no-ip or another dynamic DNS service (for peanuts or free if you don't mind logging in every month and updating them...)
even on a private IP right now (idiots still haven't fixed my problem, called them again tonight, said they are working on it...) with ZerotierOne, I can log in to the router from my mobile or home pc .
both no-ip and zerotierOne are supported by Teltonika hence me mentioning them. Sure Jake can explain things much better.

V.

I agree re the VPN idea but the dynamic DNS won't work.

None of the UK network operators are using public IP addresses. They are worth 60usd each, so it's just financially unviable.
Dynamic DNS helps if you have a publicly routable IP that changes occasionally. With SIM cards in the UK, they will all have a private IP (like 10.x.x.x.) which you can't get to from the internet.

 

[jakew009]

Presently approximately 35 all fixed IP SIMs on an aggregated account whereby 100MB is costing us £7 per SIM per month, and on each a 24 month contract. Most are at least 2/3 through their contract period, but we are under pressure to reduce SIM fees we levy our clients.

We hook these to our water chiller controllers on sites across the UK, but mostly in central London. So we can monitor the chillers functions remotely. We like the RUT955 because it has the ability to accept an external digital (relay) input we use to send us a fault alert and fault reset email. This means we do not have to set the Router up to read the Bacnet or Modbus data from the controller, we just set up a simple spare On / Off relay, that the chiller controller switches when a fault occurs.

OK we don't use masses of data, but I think we are being fleeced on the basis we must use fixed IP SIMs. More recently the SIMs we use are multi network, which helps if a cell site goes down. So is there a way we can use a non fixed IP SIM and is there somewhere I can find an idiots guide on how we use them / set them up, and essentially what the jargon these devices use actually means . So if there is a way we can set up the RUT955 with a non fixed IP SIM via some of its numerous onboard capabilities e.g. VPN, I would be very grateful. Doing this will allow us to reduce the service cost and consequent fees to our clients and allow us to open up froM 35 SIMs to (hopefully) hundreds.

If someone knows a firm that could help us, and won't fleece us I am more than happy to move away from our current provider who insists only fixed IP will work for us. I would say that once set up an individual router isn't going anywhere, so not like it keep having to identify where it is - we know where it is.

I can then work out the benefits for fitting one of these on my boat.

So all you need is an email notification when the relay closes? Do you use the RUT955 for anything else?

 

[Hurricane]

Just to recap on the DDNS/Public/Static IP address.
To make a direct connection to a CGNAT connection seems difficult.
But there is a solution.

If you build a private VPN, you can get around these issues.
However, you DO need ONE PUBLIC IP Address (either Static or Dynamic).
My system does just this.
I have a router connected to a PUBLIC IP Address - at my home (broadband) but this could be a router based in a company's office.
Then all my "clients" connect to that router - because they CAN connect to that PUBLIC IP Address.
I have set the routing up in that router so that any of the "clients" can then contact each other when they are connected to the PUBLIC IP Address router.
The "clients" keep their connection "open - online" all the time they are powered up.
The "clients" can use any old internet connection - even WiFi (but you wouldn't of course)
I'm using the word "client" here but strictly, the software that I'm using is a "peer to peer" system.

I'm sure this is a solution that could be adopted.
Because it works.
The key is that you have to have one public IP Address somewhere.

 

[Hurricane]

So all you need is an email notification when the relay closes? Do you use the RUT955 for anything else?

That will be an interesting answer because if it is only an email alarm, there must be a load of solutions.
But I suspect that @superheat6k needs an IP connection to the chillers.

 

[superheat6k]

That will be an interesting answer because if it is only an email alarm, there must be a load of solutions.
But I suspect that @superheat6k needs an IP connection to the chillers.

I need the email report plus connection to our machines - water chillers.

 

[jakew009]

I need the email report plus connection to our machines - water chillers.

I'll send you a PM

 

[vas]

just came across this thread again,

for what it's worth, COSMOTE (my provider here in Greece) gave me again this public IP that I always had (without bothering to inform me so I found by accident...), so now I can view everything from home as per normal, even checking all 8cells of my 8S LifePO4 bat in realtime if I'm really bored

 

[Hurricane]

just came across this thread again,

for what it's worth, COSMOTE (my provider here in Greece) gave me again this public IP that I always had (without bothering to inform me so I found by accident...), so now I can view everything from home as per normal, even checking all 8cells of my 8S LifePO4 bat in realtime if I'm really bored

Well done, Vas, how much chain is currently deployed??

 

[vas]

chain is out of the windlass, so no chain in seabed.
Was testing my chain counter code and after maybe 40-50h or fooling around and optimising the code on and off for the last 3yrs, found the culprit an hour ago; was a stupid timing error in oneWire async mode reading some DS18B20 sensors inside the fridges.

Now, finally works accurately, result!

V.

 

[vas]

actually the screen before is from grafana, so could get it even on the private ip the one below from the ESP32 running the diyBMS onboard is what I couldn't get from home: