Control Network Newsletter
Monitor Your Facility Remotely
As the need for social distancing becomes increasingly necessary during the COVID-19 outbreak, the benefits of being able to monitor and control building automation systems remotely becomes apparent. We offer several products which can assist you.
Contemporary Controls offers a variety of IP routers with VPN support that provide secure remote access to your devices on the job site. This helps to easily troubleshoot or program the devices from your office or home. If an existing internet connection can be used at the job site, a wired IP router will suffice. If the existing network cannot be used or none is present at the job site, use one of our cellular routers—with options available for both AT&T and Verizon. We are also expanding our VPN solutions by introducing the Self-HostedVPN along with the current RemoteVPN service. With Self-HostedVPN, an EIGR-V gigabit IP router acts as the VPN server and can support our wired and cellular routers as VPN clients. This self-hosted solution lets the user set up and maintain their own remote access solution without any subscription fee and without any cloud-based VPN server.
The EIGR-V router has an OpenVPN server that can be easily configured with the built-in webpage interface. The certificates and keys for VPN clients are also easily generated via the webpage without the user having to learn the complexities of setting up a VPN. Up to 15 IP routers and 15 PC/Tablets can be supported with this solution allowing access to 15 remote sites via cellular (EIGR-C) or wired VPN routers (EIGR-V /EIPR-V). The webpage also lets you control access permissions for the PC/tablet/phone clients to the remote sites. OpenVPN clients are freely available for Windows, Linux, iOS and Android devices.
Our VPN solutions provide secure remote access to any IP device by just using the VPN IP address for a device—without the need to setup NAT or port forwarding rules for individual devices. There is also no need for static or public IP addresses for VPN client devices, only internet access needs to be provided. For Self-HostedVPN, you are responsible to provide a public IP address for only the EIGR-V router running as the OpenVPN server so that the VPN clients can access it. You can easily put this behind an existing infrastructure router and use port forwarding from the infrastructure/internet router to the EIGR-V OpenVPN server. With RemoteVPN, this requirement of setting up the EIGR-V OpenVPN server with Static Public IP goes away. Both Self-HostedVPN and RemoteVPN solutions work for older IP devices where it is not possible to configure an IP gateway address on the device.
Learn more on the RemoteVPN product page.