Lonworks network management requires a “single owner” to perform and maintain an accurate database of things such as node address assignments, nv bindings, message services used, and a raft of other definitions. The Niagara lonworks driver supplies this network management capability, by default. Typically, you engineer a LonNetwork with the station acting as the “network manager” for all Lonworks devices on that network. See Station as network manager.

However, in some scenarios you may wish to install a JACE as simply another “Lonworks node,” where another (external) Lonworks network management tool is used (for example, LNS). In this case, you configure the LocalLonDevice to not perform network management. Instead, you expose other station data as network variables (nvs) and ncis under the LocalLonDevice.

In this application, you do not use the various views of the LonNetwork (Lon Device Manager, Lon Link Manager, and so on) as described in much of this document. For more details, see Notes when configuring as Lon node.