Hello everyone, I hope I can find some help here.
I have been setting up a few RAK7289 with the Chirpstack OS v4 with the goal of setting up a LoRa Mesh in a small region. So far, I have a Raspberry Pi 4 setup as a chirpstack server and configured all my gateways to send data over the MQTT forwarder. The data transmission is pretty solid.
The problem comes up when I try to add more connectivity features to my gateways. I have set a wireguard VPN on all gateways and it works consistently as long as I have a consistent connection over LAN or WLAN. But the idea of the VPN is that I can keep a remote access on my individual gateways to change them from border ↔ relay or update them if necessary. Since I don’t have internet access in all my locations, I want to use a SIM card to connect to my gateway through the wireguard VPN.
On the chirpstack UI of the gateway, I have tried to add a new interface for QMI Cellular. The first time I set this up on four gateways, which all went online for a few days before going back offline forever. I don’t have remote access with the VPN anymore. Since then, I have tried to set up other gateways to reproduce the error and try to find the cause for the offline behaviour, but had no luck. When I disconnect the new gateways from the LAN or WLAN, I see them go offline and loose the VPN connection to them.
Is there a special configuration to make in chirpstack that I am missing? Has anyone ever attempted to setup a VPN that goes through the SIM card in the RAK7289? I have the Persistent Keep Alive configuration for the wireguard set on 25s, is this correct for what I am attempting? Do I need to set up a bridge of some kind to route the internet connection from the SIM to the local network of the gateway? Do I need to make changes to the firewall settings in chirpstack?
Please help me );
Just to recap:
I have about 15 gateways that are spread over a wide area, where each location might have (but mostly not) a LAN or WLAN connection. I want to be able to access each gateway remotely to make changes to their configurations. To do so, I have set up a wireguard VPN and tried to use the SIM module to access the chirpstack OS installed on the RAKs.
Thank you in advance for the help,
Laura