Please contact your Rajant regional sales representative. They will be able to best assist you in resolving your account issue and provide suggestions for your organization. If you are not sure who your sales representative is, contact Rajant Customer Support by clicking help at the top of this page. The support team will find your sales representative and have them reach out to you. 

Please contact your Rajant regional sales representative. They will assist you in resetting your account. If you are not sure who your sales representative is, contact Rajant Customer Support by clicking help at the top of this page. The support team will find your sales representative and have them reach out to you. 

If the switch you are connected to or the computer running BC|Commander does not support IPv6, you will need to have an IPv4 address in the same subnet as the BreadCrumb. If the ethernet port on the switch that the PC running BC|Commander is connected to or that BreadCrumb is connected to is disabled, you will not be able to connect to the BreadCrumb directly. Consider examining or looking further into those specified settings.

In BC|Commander v11, navigate to File -> Preferences -> BreadCrumb Discovery and select Both for discovery protocol. Following the above directions should allow you to find BreadCrumbs utilizing IPv6, as long as VLANs are configured correctly or not in use.

Go to the Mesh tab in BC|Commander and select the “Scan for BreadCrumbs” option. This will search for undiscovered BreadCrumbs.

Each breadcrumb can have multiple variations in configuration. Most problems seen in a mesh can be correlated to unintentional inconsistent configurations in BC|Commander. It is very common that specific configurations can be made in individual nodes, but not in others. This can cause detrimental effects to or inhibit maximum network potential.

Mesh Analyze is the best "first glance tool" to  make sure the configurations amongst desired groups of nodes and networks are as uniform as planned. To use the Mesh Analyze tool, you select the “Mesh” tab on the top left in BC|Commander and choose Analyze.

Mesh Analyze performs a link and configuration analysis against the current mesh and displays the results in the current tab. It brings up configuration inconsistencies that can be used to assist in configuring individual nodes to match. For detailed information about this feature, you can view the most recent BC|Commander User Guide via the Support Portal in the Files section.

A mesh snapshot stores details about the network running at that time. Rajant Support uses these to diagnose technical issues.

To take a snapshot in BC|Commander, select 'File' -> 'Save Mesh Snapshot As ' -> press 'OK' to begin the snapshot taking process. If all BreadCrumbs are not captured during this process, ensure they are selected in the UI and extend the snapshot timeout.

The APT Priority of a BreadCrumb determines who the APT Master is for the network. The BreadCrumb with the highest priority will be the master. If there are two BreadCrumbs with the same APT Priority, the one with the highest MAC Address will be the Master. APT Priority can be set manually if a network has a preference on the order of which BreadCrumbs will become Master.

The default APT Priority for most BreadCrumbs is 100. The SlipStream has an APT Priority of 110 by default since it is designed for the role of APT Master and dedicated to the aggregation of wired traffic. Some other models such as the JR3 have a lower default APT Priority and are not designed to handle being APT Master.

By default a BreadCrumb starting up or connecting to the ethernet for the first time will not take over from the current APT Master to avoid network disruption, even if it has a higher APT Priority. The new BreadCrumb will become the next highest APT Priority should the current APT Master be disconnected or restarted. This can be changed so that the highest priority BreadCrumb always becomes the Master right away via the "Request Fallback" feature on the desired Ethernet port in the specific BreadCrumb's configuration settings.

The colored dot (Flag) next to each BreadCrumb indicates the current status of a BreadCrumb. There are four colors that these indicators can be.

Green - The BreadCrumb is connected to BC|Commander.

Red - The BreadCrumb was previously connected to the network and/or BC|Commander but is not currently connected. This could be an indicator that the password is entered incorrectly if you just opened BC|Commander and attempted to authenticate. To find out, right click on the column header and add the "Connection Status" column. It will indicate if a red dot means login failure or disconnected.

Grey - BreadCrumb is disconnected. May appear white or grey. If you just opened BC|Commander and have not entered BreadCrumb login information yet, you may see this color on discovered BreadCrumbs.

Blue - Attempting to connect to this BreadCrumb with BC|Commander.

Other Flags - These (if any) will show in addition to the main flags listed above.
Gold Key - Crypto Officer
Silver Key - Admin
Magnifying Glass: View Only
Red X: Severe error detected, see alerts section.
Yellow Caution Triangle: Warnings detected, see alerts section.
Yellow Circle Arrow: Rebooting.

BreadCrumb networks are designed for easy use and setup by using default settings. This allows them to mesh right out of the box. It is recommended for all passwords (crypto officer, admin, view, and the Network Key) be changed on established networks. This alert appears to remind you to change the settings so that an unauthorized BreadCrumb will not connect to your mesh network, and so unknown users on the LAN (or from any BreadCrumb's Ethernet) will not be able to configure the network without knowing the non-default passphrases/keys you set.

BC|Enterprise is a web based application that helps monitor network performance. The program is "always on," monitoring and gathering data. The data is examined using either individual BreadCrumbs or groups specified by the network administrator. The program can be utilized on site or remotely, and supports multiple user accounts.

When making changes to BC|Enterprise and the user has saved those changes, a prompt appears stating that settings are being changed and that the program is being restarted. In order for the program to restart automatically, a step after installation must be enabled. For a Windows machine you will need to go to the Windows Service Controller, and select “Rajant BC|Enterprise Service,” right click and select “Choose Properties.” In the “Service Properties” dialog box that appears make sure that “Automatic” is set for the startup type. On the “Recovery” tab, “First Failure,” “Second Failure,” and “Subsequent Failure” need to be set to “Restart Service.” Lastly, the “Restart Services After” option needs to be set to 0 minutes.

Detailed instructions and screenshots of this process can be found in the BC|Enterprise User Guide in section Section 2.3.2: Installing on 64-bit Microsoft Windows and look at Figure - C. Information on completing this process for other operating systems are also included.

The values that appear in the Channel Activity graphs are always the correct instantaneous channel activity value. The gaps that are seen in these graphs do not indicate problems for the BreadCrumb. The gaps in this graph typically occur for two different reasons. The first is that there is no difference between two update packets. When this occurs the formula that is programmed to calculate the channel activity can not be completed because of a missing value in the calculations. The second is that when BC|Enterprise has received an update that did not include radio time counter information. When the data is received without this information, BC|Enterprise assumes that the radio had been reset and does not generate channel activity values for this time period.

The gaps in this graph can be avoided by increasing the time between BreadCrumb updates in BC|Connector. By increasing this value, the likelihood of a time difference in the radios increases. Locate the “General Watch Interval” (general.watch) and change the value. The default setting is every 8 seconds, the recommended increased amount is 30 seconds.

Please note that the following answer assumes BC|Connector is functioning properly and the BreadCrumbs have been running for an extended period of time.

The charts titled “Top TX Data Rate,” “Top TX Packets/sec,” “Top RX Data Rate,” and “Top RX Packets/sec” contain information that BC|Enterprise considers optional. To allow these graphs to populate, a certain setting must be enabled. Enabling this option can put strain on your network, so enabling this feature only on the BreadCrumbs that you are interested in monitoring is recommended. To enable it, go to Configure -> Instamesh -> General -> Enable Peer Statistics Reporting.

If the file is smaller than 1 GB, you can make a note in the ticket submission that the file was too large. The Support Team will then send a customized link for file uploads (or see the next paragraph to handle this in advanced). Note that this method does require a valid Support Portal login.

The upload link will be in this format:
https://secure.rajant.com/snapshot/upload?ticket= nnnnn  where “ nnnnn ” is the ticket number that the snapshot is associated with. Please reply to your open Helpdesk ticket with the name of this snapshot so the Support Team will quickly know it is now available. You should open the ticket first to get a ticket number if you have not already done so and mention you are about to upload it.

If the file is larger than 1 GB, mention that in the ticket submission and the Support Team will direct you on the next course of action.

Rajant support also provides a Support Portal that allows for downloads of software and user guides. Please visit https://secure.rajant.com/ and select 'Login.'

Spec sheets can be found rajant.com, the Support Portal, and the Partner Portal.

If any of the radio ports are not in use, if there is no antenna attached, then an attenuator or RF terminator should be placed on those ports and the “Enable Mesh” option in BC|Commander should be unchecked. Leaving the antennas uncapped will affect the performance of the radio and cause damage to your radio in the long term .

When determining the wlan channel settings, it is important to find the one that has the least amount of busy time. To accomplish this select each of the different available channels and select the one that displays the smallest Busy Time percentage in the “Radio” section of the “Details” pane.

When adjusting the Range for one of the wlans, it needs to be set to the maximum distance that is going to be needed for the network. If this range is set lower than is required, this could result in unnecessary retries. If the range is set too high, the maximum throughput of your network will be lowered.

Dynamic Transmit Power should be enabled. This provides peer-to-peer automatic power adjustment, which optimizes the signal-to-noise (SNR). Enabling this allows the BreadCrumb to change the power depending on the proximity of the device that it is communicating with. For example, a BreadCrumb would use high power for distant devices, and low power for those that are located in close proximity.

Radio Beacon Intervals are packets sent periodically from BreadCrumbs to indicate their presence. Rajant recommends a limit of 400 ms. If SSIDs are configured and AP mode is in use, this setting should be set to 10 times the number of BreadCrumbs. For mesh only mode, this setting is ignored and beacons are always sent once per second. Following these rules will help reduce noise and interference on your network caused by these packets.

Radio Timeout in seconds is the inactivity timer that is used to detect/remove lost connections. Recommended to be set to 3 times the number of BreadCrumbs.

An important feature to utilize is APT Timeout, which is how long an APT peer will wait before it terminates a connection because of a lack of keepalive packets received. The value also determines how long a network will wait without communication from a Master before a new one is elected. For networks with original (non-rapid) Spanning Tree a minimum value of 45,000 ms is used internally even if the configured APT timeout is less than 45,000 ms. For networks with Rapid Spanning Tree a minimum value of 8,000 ms is used internally even if the configured APT timeout is less than 8,000 ms. If you are not sure, Rajant recommends using the default value of 45,000 ms. Using a value that is too small can result in multiple APT masters and loop conditions that will be detrimental to mesh performance and stability.

For BreadCrumbs connected directly to another device that isn't a switch or router, the APT Timeout can be configured as low as 6,000 ms.

The Flood Rate setting should be utilized. It will help networks that suffer from large amounts of unnecessary packets, such as broadcast and multicast.

To access this setting, highlight the BreadCrumb(s), right click and select “Configure”. Select “InstaMesh” from the navigation pane on the left side of the popup window. Scroll down until you reach “Max Flood (packets/second)”. For this field we recommend starting with a value of 20. Then select the “Max Flood per Source (packets/second)”, which we recommend starting with a value of 10.

The multicast rate for your network should be left at default settings to start with. Setting your multicast rate lower will allow the signal to reach farther but could cause congestion on your network. If you require a desired throughout, the multicast rate should be set to 1.5 to 2 times that amount. Higher multicast rates will have less range and may be transmitted at lower power.

Under the Security settings in BC|Commander, the Network Key needs to be set. Once you have set this value you CAN NOT read it back from the BreadCrumb, so make sure that that information is saved somewhere. Also, there are other passphrases, such as the SSID WPA2 passphrase, that cannot be read back. Remember all BreadCrumbs must have the same Network Name and Network Key in order to mesh with other BreadCrumbs.