Pre-installed forwarders

To integrate with many Clouds and Network Servers, LORIX OS is shipped with some default Packet Forwarders:

Differences between LORIX One and Wifx L1

The LORIX One and the Wifx L1 have different LoRa concentrator chips. This generally means they have different software variants to handle the chip. With the Wifx L1, the legacy Semtech UDP Packet Forwarder has been abandoned in favor or new generation softwares that are more reliable and easier to maintain.

As sometimes multiple software are used in combination (one to handle the LoRa concentrator, one to connect to the server), the names can be a bit confusing. Here is a table summarizing the differences of available forwarders in LORIX OS depending of the protocol of the server:

ProtocolLORIX OneL1
Semtech UDP

Semtech UDP Packet Forwarder

udp-packet-forwarder

ChirpStack Concentratord + ChirpStack UDP Bridge

csub-concentratord

LNS

Basic Station

lora-basic-station

Basic Station

lora-basic-station

ChirpStack MQTT

Semtech UDP Packet Forwarder + ChirpStack Gateway Bridge

chirpstack-gateway-bridge

ChirpStack Concentratord + ChirpStack Gateway Bridge

csgb-concentratord

LORIOT

LORIOT forwarder

loriot-packet-forwarder

LORIOT forwarder

loriot-packet-forwarder

Please note that ChirpStack has renamed/refactored the software in v4, which is not yet reflected in LORIX OS:

  • ChirpStack Gateway Bridge → ChirpStack MQTT forwarder
  • ChirpStack UDP Bridge → ChirpStack UDP forwarder

Manage the forwarder

The manager provides a set of tools to manage the forwarder in an easy and centralized way. They are generally available from both the GUI and the CLI.

Overview

  1. Shows the active forwarder and it's basic information
  2. Shows the status and control of the active forwarder
  3. Live display of the forwarder logs
  4. Shows the configuration of the active forwarder. This part is specific to each forwarder.
  5. Forwarder control buttons
  6. Active forwarder selector

The available CLI commands are:

COMMANDS:
   active                                       Print the currently active forwarder
   available                                    Print all available forwarders
   set                                          Set the active forwarder
   udp-packet-forwarder                         Manage UDP Packet Forwarder
   loriot-packet-forwarder                      Manage LORIOT packet forwarder
   chirpstack-gateway-bridge                    Manage ChirpStack Gateway Bridge
   lora-basic-station                           Manage LoRa Basic Station


Select the forwarder

Only one forwarder can be running on the system at the same time.

You can choose your forwarder on the LoRa Settings page using the Active forwarder selector (4).

To see the available forwarders, use:

manager lora forwarder available
BASH 

Available forwarders are:
- UDP Packet Forwarder (udp-packet-forwarder, upf)
- LORIOT packet forwarder (loriot-packet-forwarder, loriot)
- ChirpStack Gateway Bridge (chirpstack-gateway-bridge)
- LoRa Basic Station (lora-basic-station)

You can set the active forwarder with:

sudo manager lora forwarder set <FORWARDER>
BASH

FORWARDER must be the forwarder ID as shown in the available command output. Any alias can be used.

Example

sudo manager lora forwarder set lora-basic-station
BASH 
settings active forwarder to 'lora-basic-station'...     done

Configure the forwarder

Each forwarder has different parameters to be set up. Please refer for the page relative to the forwarder to have additional information about how it is configured.

Control the forwarder

You can control the forwarder on the LoRa Settings page using the Forwarder control buttons (5).

To start the forwarder, use:

manager lora forwarder <FORWARDER> start
BASH

Example

sudo manager lora forwarder lora-basic-station start
BASH 
LoRa Basic Station forwarder has been started

You can stop or restart the forwarder with the similar start and restart commands.

Logging

Independently of the selected forwarder, the output is centralized in a single place to facilitate diagnostic.

The standard and error output (stdout and stderr) are logged to syslogd.

The forwarder logging can be enabled or disabled through the configuration files available in /etc/pmonitor/services-available by settings the log property to false.

Installing another forwarder

The integration of third party forwarders is usually made by the Cloud or Network Server providers. Please refer to their documentation to get additional information. If you are a Packet Forwarder provider, please check the Software integration guide.