Host Engineering Forum

General Category => Do-more CPUs and Do-more Designer Software => Topic started by: brucek on November 10, 2022, 08:22:31 AM

Title: Trying to set up being able to remote into PLC
Post by: brucek on November 10, 2022, 08:22:31 AM

I know this is an internal problem with IT but hoping someone else has run into the problem.
We have about 7 sites we were able to remote into prior to a corporate change of routers. As long as we were behind the company firewall we could get into the plc's thru port forwarding 172.???.???.??? to 192.168.???.???. Someone in there infinite wisdom decided that what we had wasn't good enough so they changed out some routers and outsourced the management of the routers.

So i added the pom ecom modules to the brx plcs and gave them the 172.???.???.??? numbers and got them on the same subnets. Now i can ping the plc and get 4 outs and 4 ins with about 20 ms round trip. We enabled the web page from the main config screen which we can see if we go thru a web page.

However we can't log in thru do more designer so i'm guessing its the port 28784 that is hanging us up.

Just wondering if anyone else is having issues like this that figured out how to get this to work so i can let the IT guy know what to try. We can get in thru teamviewer and take over a computer which is fine for troubleshooting but i'm trying to email out some data and that part isn't working.

Title: Re: Trying to set up being able to remote into PLC
Post by: MAEdwards on November 10, 2022, 10:13:38 AM

If the port is not being blocked, you may need to increase your Ethernet Timeout Settings under the Advanced Settings button on the Port tab of the Configure Link window.

If your access is being restricted, you may want to consider a VPN solution.  A VPN tunnel is much more secure than port forwarding, and will be much more IT friendly.  I use the StrideLinx VPN routers as my remote connection solution.  As a VPN router, these are easy to setup and typically accepted by IT departments since communication to the cloud is initiated with OUTBOUND messages.  Whereas the StrideLinx VPN routers offer various other features like data logging, notifications, and premium branding for your company, I do not use any of these features.  I like to keep things simple and use my remote access device for remote access.