Connecting a third-party OPC client to Ignition OPC-UA Server

Ignition
1

Good day,

I have a project that is currently trying to use the third-party OPC client to connect to the Ignition OPC-UA Server. The thirdy-party client is PI OPC Client from PI Historian. The client can detect other OPC servers except the Ignition OPC-UA Server.
I am using localhost as my endpoint address for testing for both the server and the client on the same machine.

How do you make the OPC-UA Server discoverable to the OPC client?

Thanks,

Kerwin

2

Kerwin,

Something you might want to check is the port number. PI Connector for OPC UA uses port 4840 by default, but Ignition uses 4096. The other thing to check, which I ran into, was that the default is to not allow anonymous access to Ignition’s OPC UA Server. You can turn this on and it will connect without a problem, but if not, you will likely want to create another user in the opcua-module profile for the PI Connector (unless you want to use the default Ignition one, which is opcuauser/password. Of course, because the Ignition OPC-UA Server’s certificates are self-signed, they will naturally be untrusted. You will have to move them from the (C:\Program Files\PIPC\Connectors\OpcUa\pkiclient) rejected to the trusted folder in the PI Connector installation folder as well.

I hope that helps.

3

Dear Herbie,

Thank you sir for your reply. I have disregard the PI OPC Client and transferred to Matrikon OPC Explorer. I am using the Matrikon client because the Matrikon OPC-UA Tunneller can be downloaded as trial version for testing. I don’t have access for the PI Connector for OPC-UA. I also used the UAExpert for additional comparison.

Thanks.

Kerwin

4

If your intent was just to browse tags and not use the PI Connector for OPC-UA to collect data into PI Historian or PI AF, then I would stay away from that. I have used UAExpert (free) to connect and view the tags, and this works extremely well. Ignition also has a client built into the web configuration screens, but wouldn’t be something I would want most users using.

Glad you got what you needed.

Nic

5

Hello, I want to dig up this post because I am in a similar problem and I do not know how to solve it, I want to see the labels of the opc server (which is installed locally) to the opc client (which is in the cloud) but I can not have communication because it says that it cannot find the server, I would greatly appreciate any comment that could help me, thank you.

6

This isn’t really an OPC question, but a basic networking issue. Most local installs are behind firewalls and in private (non-publicly-routable) addresses. Ideally, you would set up a VPN to give your cloud computer access inside your plant. There are other possibilities, but none secure enough to recommend.

7

is there any vpn option that you can recommend me to do this?
thanks for answering

8

I use OpenVPN for all of my own, custom VPN solutions. My big clients tend to use Checkpoint or Cisco.

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