Can i connect to my CompactLogix PLC over internet?

drbitboy said:

d'Oh! Of course, I was trying to draw an analogy to NAT, which does not work. Thanks



Well, whatever we call it, there are some VPN-oriented services out "there," e.g. https://www.ovpn.com/, and if the VPN path is using them then the VPN goes through "it".



Ah, thanks, this is what I was looking for. How to connect to that hardware, from outside, i.e. from the WAN side of my home-office router, is the part I wanted to understand e.g. port forwarding would be one way, but there are also those VPN services, that avoid the need to port-forward. It all depends on the reason for the VPN.

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You are correct, for example for country changing purposes or other purposes I use Hide.ME for a VPN and it is technically "in the cloud"

I should have phrased my response better. My home VPN is not "in the cloud" it's a server in my rack.

ArcReactorKC said:

You are correct, for example for country changing purposes or other purposes I use Hide.ME for a VPN and it is technically "in the cloud"

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Actually, I think I used the wrong terminology with regard to my situation (SOHO to SOHO): the VPN may route through the cloud, but the VPN server is behind one of the routers. As @ArcReactorKC wrote, if the PLC in one of the SOHOs is the target, then a VPN server has to be behind that SOHO's router, because it would be pretty extraordinary for a PLC to implement an internal VPN interface/stack.

Haha I just realized summat else: what if my brother's SOHO and my SOHO use the same subnet? Of course there is [route add ...], yes, but what a mess.

Ken Roach said:

Not only did I cut off a remote development team from their computers for a few hours, I exposed that CompactLogix and PC directly to the Internet. There were a dozen computers in China connected to my CompactLogix when I discovered the mistake and pulled the plug.

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How did you determine this? I'm just curious, because I'm aware of a handful of PLC's that are, shall we say, less than robustly connected to the internet, and I'd be curious to see how many people (or bots) might be poking about in them. How can you see who is connected to it?

ASF said:

How did you determine this? I'm just curious, because I'm aware of a handful of PLC's that are, shall we say, less than robustly connected to the internet, and I'd be curious to see how many people (or bots) might be poking about in them. How can you see who is connected to it?

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Maybe firewall logs? While I'm not an IT guy, I'm sure they have visibility of connections coming from the outside and what is being connected to. If you didn't have all of that fancy stuff, I'm sure you could figure something out by looking at the PLC's web page while people are actively connected.