OPC Tunneller enables classic OPC servers and clients to communicate with each other by-passing the troublesome DCOM settings, to alternatively use the secure and efficient single port OPC UA TCP/IP communication. The OPC tunneling software bridges the gap between OPC classic servers and clients located in different networks without compromising network security. Utthunga’s uOPC® Tunneller is developed on our reliable and secure uOPC Server framework designed by our highly skilled OPC experts.
OPC Classic is based on Microsoft’s COM/DCOM (Component Object Model) technology. Typically, in an OPC Classic setup, for an OPC classic client to connect to the OPC classic server running in different networks, the right DCOM configuration is required. The DCOM configuration settings are susceptible to changes either due to security or Windows patch updates. The DCOM security model also defines the user accounts that have access to the application, as well as the user accounts from which an application can accept connections. Additionally Windows firewall requires you to add the COM applications to the exclusion list for communicating over a network. In brief, it’s not your average Joe task.
A tunneller eliminates the problems associated with DCOM while connecting OPC clients to servers. The OPC bridging tunneller is a combination of an in-built OPC wrapper and a proxy. A brief explanation on their working is given below.
An OPC UA Proxy is a software which has an inbuilt OPC classic server and UA client. This enables a classic OPC client to talk to an OPC UA server. A pictorial representation of OPC DA to UA communication is given below.
An OPC UA Wrapper acts in the opposite of an OPC UA Proxy. It has an inbuilt OPC UA server and a Classic client. So it enables an OPC UA client to fetch data from an OPC classic server. A pictorial representation of OPC UA to DA communication is given below.
An OPC UA Tunneller is a combination of UA Proxy and UA Wrapper working together across the network firewall. So it is effectively an OPC DA across firewall that converts the network traffic to OPC UA TCP/IP from the native COM-DCOM as shown below. These TCP/IP settings are easy to configure in the firewall using a single port.
In summary, the uOPC® Tunneller product can be used for the following use cases.
The summary of all the above business scenarios are shown in a high level diagram as shown below.
uOPC® Tunneller enables OPC DA to UA connection. This avoids the challenges of DCOM configuration by using Proxy and Wrapper components on the local systems which interface with the respective OPC Classic server and clients via COM settings.
The two uOPC Tunneller components communicate with one another via OPC UA. IT engineers managing the network infrastructure will add the port number and IP addresses of the servers and clients details in the firewall settings of the router as part of the port forwarding mechanism. Additional DCOM configuration is not required and Windows firewall configuration is limited to allowing access to the port being used by the uOPC Tunneller components on the respective machines.
Software Platform Requirement:
Hardware Platform Requirement
Utthunga’s uOPC® Tunneling solutions helps industrial enterprises to build a secure and reliable communication network without facing frequent configuration and security issues. uOPC® Tunneller helps your industrial automation communication to:
No, you need not restart. Just make sure you add the new tags in the OPC Tunneller Server configuration tool. For this, you will need to go to the menu bar and check the “Browse Synchronously” option.
Yes, you can select the firewall access to the port option during the installation of the uOPC Tunneller setup. Every time you change the port number, you will need to give access to the new port manually.
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