Is a physical Lon adapter (FTT-=10, etc.) required by the host to use the LonIp driver?

No Lon adapter is required. The LonIp driver uses the host’s Ethernet port—unlike the standard Lonworks driver, which binds any Lon network to a specific Lon adapter by device name (LON1 or LON2). In the LonIp driver, this device name is fixed, read-only as LonIp.

Find this in property sheet of a LonIpNetwork, by expanding its Lon Comm Config container.

Why cannot I add the LonIpNetwork from the Driver Manager, as with most other drivers?

You cannot use the Driver Manager view to add the LonIpNetwork component because the driver has no separate LonIpNetwork class. The LonIpNetwork palette entry is a BLonNetwork with the comm stack and the local device changed to support communications using IP.

What is the purpose of the Config Server?

The Config Server container collects address information from each of the members of the LonIp channel, and updates all the other members with the collected information. One central device must be responsible to collect and disseminate this member information because the protocol does not provide a mechanism for members to discover each other.

Why during a device discovery, do I get a lot of warning messages, similar to below?

WARNING [12:58:48 31-Jul-09 EDT][lonip] Received response message with no matching transaction.16 00 01 19 0f 00 04 01 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 21 03 00 00 08 26 81 80 00 01 01 01 01 9a 21

This is normal behavior for the LonIp driver (LonIpNetwork), as the driver receives and processes all messages on the wire addressed to the device. Discovery involves broadcasting a request/response message, and then processing the first response, which closes out the transaction. Other responses may be received after the matching transaction has completed.

When using the standard Lonworks driver (LonNetwork), these warning messages do not appear because the Neuron processes the messages off the wire, and filters out all except the first response.