TTN: If the GUI fails, just go commandline

At the moment, the console page of The Things Network has some problems getting the Gateway page. It has been reported on the forums, it appears to be a front-end thing, the gateways themselves appear to be working just fine.

So unless you want to get info about your gateway, add a new one, remove or change one, there should be no problem. If you have to do one of these things, you can also use the commandline interface (CLI) using the tool provided here.

It allows you to login using your account, get information about your gateways, add new ones, remove them etc.
The Rx / Tx info shows you the amount of trafic on the gateway (uplink and downlink).
It also offers a MQTT interface if you want to have a look at the data coming in from your devices without having to go to the website.

Besides giving answers, in my case it also raised some new questions:

If you click on the screenshot to enlarge it, you’ll see 2 gateways listed. One (“eui-b827ebffff2e837b”)  is the LoPy Nano Gateway which has been heaving nicely since it actually got connected with an increasing count for Rx because it still is forwarding messages from my nodes here at my desk.

The other one (“eui-b827ebffff2e837b”)  is the single channel Raspberry Pi + Dragino Lora Shield that I at first managed to get online last week, but then at the end of the day stopped working (see here). Now at first, looking at it via the CLI did indeed show that it hadn’t been seen for a while. After removing the gateway and adding it again via the CLI, it did show up as recently seen. And apparently it still sees it.

I noticed that the gateway is working again because my nodes now sometimes list both of the gateways as receiving and transporting their messages:

  

Great. So, it works? Yes, but what I don’t understand yet is why the LoPy Nano Gateway is connected to a “bridge” that is called the “PacketForwarder Backend” while the Raspberry Pi is connected to “staging”. Why the difference? Also, how come that the Rx for the Raspberry Pi seems to be resetting all the time?

There is one thing that could explain the difference: because I am using NAT, I have setup port forwarding for UDP on port 1700 to the LoPy Nano Gateway. I cannot do that for both (I got only 1 externally visible IP address), so I am guessing that the TTN backend can reach the LoPy Nano Gateway, but cannot reach the Raspbery Pi. But does that explain the difference in bridge assignment?