Gateway working but status offline, why?

ChirpStack (v4)
1

I am new to Chirpstack and recently installed V4 on Ubuntu with all components on the same server. I have everything working well with 2 gateways and some sensors hooked up and working as expected. But one gateway (Milesight UG63) has been showing status = offline for the last few days, this followed a power outage. But the strange thing is the gateway is working just fine and in the Chirpstack interface I can see LoraWAN frames being received regularly. The gateway is configured to use Semtech packet forwarder and if I check on the gateway UI it also reports that it is connected to Chirpstack.

So I am just wondering what is causing this? How does the Chirpstack UI decide if the gateway is offline? Could it be that something has become corrupt so that it gets stuck in the offline status? How do I fix it?

Thanks in advance! I can see a few similar issues have been raised previously but none seem to fully explain this scenario.

2

Are you able to find your gateway packets in mqtt?

3

I can see packets from the sensors in the UI every day, here is an example:

Screenshot 2024-06-28 at 11.50.24 AM
Screenshot 2024-06-28 at 11.50.24 AM1676×1150 87.6 KB

4

The gateway should send a gateway update via MQTT every 30 seconds (by default).
If no gateway update packet in 30s, the gateway will show offline.
Check the MQTT log if ChirpStack receives such gateway update?

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image1042×591 17.8 KB

Check the packets in the below MQTT subscription.
https://www.chirpstack.io/docs/chirpstack-gateway-bridge/integrations/mqtt.html

5

OK, nothing in MQTT but I do see this bridge error in the syslog. This IP is the gateway in question so maybe this is the problem? This error appears every 30 seconds. So does this mean that this error is being caused by the semtech packet forwarder on the gateway? Its weird that packets from sensors are being routed through this gateway very reliably.

Jun 28 04:48:29 s02 chirpstack-gateway-bridge[850]: time=“2024-06-28T04:48:29.978056295Z” level=error msg=“backend/semtechudp: could not handle packet” addr=“220.235.28.27:51791” data_base64=“Asf2ACThJP/++OJgeyJzdGF0Ijp7InRpbWUiOiIyMDI0LTA2LTI4IDA0OjQ4OjIzIEFFUz/wG84/+BvOPyIsInJ4bmIiOjAsInJ4b2siOjAsInJ4ZnciOjAsImFja3IiOjAuMCwiZHduYiI6MCwidHhuYiI6MCwidGVtcCI6MC4wfX0=” error=“invalid character ‘\x1b’ in string literal”

6

May be you can check if you can upgrade the firmware of the gateway?
BTW, gateway status packets and sensor uplink packets are different packets.

The other gateway is working fine with active status?

7

Thanks for the suggestions. Yes, the other gateway is fine. Both are Milesight gateways, the main one that works fine is a UG67 and the one I am having trouble with is a UG63. Both are brand new, I did check the firmware and seemed to be up to date but will check again and also contact Milesight.

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8

You can cross check the gateway EUI of the missing one to see if the packets is correctly forwarding to mqtt first. This could be first step, does the gateway show it is connected to lora server?

9

I had the same issue with old Multitech gateways.

From: Gateway statistics not showing - #2 by brocaar

you should verify that your packet forwarder has the protocol version 2. The protocol verstion 1 of the packet forwarder doesn’t send the stats.
You can look at the lora-gateway-bridge output: whenerver it receives data from the packet forwarder it dump the protocol version.

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10

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