**** Remote Support Devices

I've seen e w o n remote devices come up from time to time on the forums.

Use case? Reviews? Experience?

How does this compare to a more "traditional" VPN solution? Or, in particular, how would it compare to say a Stratix 5900 Services router?

I've used it in the past and it worked well. But that was when Spectrum Controls re-badged it as their own. The released their own version a couple years ago and I wasn't too fond of.

There are so many options, it's hard to pick one above the other without wasting a bunch of time researching it. Because of the poor performance of the Spectrum Unit we moved to Phoenix Contact mGuard. I have yet to personally use it but it's seems to do well according to my peers.

Basically, e Won was the first hole punching, DIN mounted VPN box that was robust and user friendly for anywhere near a reasonable price. They are proven and I've used them to connect to panels the world over. It got to the point that my previous employer would put in the contracts that the customer could either buy the e Won and connect it to the internet or pay a lot extra for all service calls. I know there are competing products, but I've never used any of them.

If there is a difference between the Stratix 5900 and an e Won besides price (100% chance that the Rockwell product costs considerably more for no reason), it may be that the Stratix 5900 can't do hole punching, which is the whole reason you would put a VPN box in a cabinet to begin with. Hole punching is when the device communicates out to a server, and you communicate to the same server and it acts as a middle man to get you talking to a device without needing to setup routers and firewalls. This is how things like TeamViewer and Join.Me work as well.

What I want to know is why does e w o n get filtered out? Is it a swear in some foreign language? I don't think I've ever seen any other vendors get filtered out.

It seems like there's probably some juicy drama there, and I'm too new in the forum to have been here when it happened. For obvious reasons, it's a bit hard to search about...

I've just setup an E won today for the first time. I had a play about at the office with it a couple of months back. It did take me a while to set it up as I was not familiar with the terminology used with computer connections such as gateway, DNS server etc etc. A steep learning curve later and I went to site today to wire in an internet connection and setup the parameters in the E won. 1.5 hours later and I had a complete connection fully tested and working.

If I was to do another one it would take maybe 15 minutes to do. Now that I know the system better I do like it. I was very impressed with the ease of setup. I also really like the M2Web app which is free with the E won, this enabled me to setup a read only VNC connection to a panelview. I setup an account for my customer which allows him to connect to the screen to monitor what is going on via a webserver anywhere in the world without any input from me. I have to say my customer was extremely impressed with it and how flexible it is.

I also setup a VPN to a PC based system last week for the first time using Teamviewer and a guide produced by a very helpful member on here. I found this to be equally as easy to do but considerably less expensive. I've now used the Teamviewer VPN to make changes to that system a couple of times and it works really well. I do like it as well.

I would definitely recommend the E won for a remote location with no local PC control. If you have a local PC dedicated to running the system you want to monitor I'd recommend Teamviewer.

mk42 said:

What I want to know is why does e w o n get filtered out? Is it a swear in some foreign language? I don't think I've ever seen any other vendors get filtered out.

Click to expand...

From what I remember, it has nothing to do with this vendor. Notice that e w o n doesn't have a .com address. Years back, the .com website was a spam site, and we got a ton of spam posted here. Filtering out the word prevented members here from accidentally clicking on malicious links before the post could be deleted.



-Eric