Masteradjust Installer Password

[Zita Lifland]

Bothappear to accomplish something of what I'm after, getting Masterbus data accessible on an N2K network. Can a CZone bridge like this be directly connected to a 'regular' NMEA-2000 network? Or is there some magic proprietary pixie dust that makes it necessary to have something else involved?

If you have CZone enabled devices, and in particular, digital switching on the MasterVolt side, then using the CZone bridge would be the best route to go. If you're just looking for MasterBus data to be on the NMEA 2000 network, then the 77031800 is the correct interface.

I had both on a previous boat, and the one that worked the best for me was the latter. If I remember correctly, the MasterBus to CZone bridge did not pass anywhere near as much data back and forth on normal electrical stuff - it was specifically focused on allowing CZone products on the N2K network to control things on the MasterBus side.

You'll still need the USB to MasterVolt interface and the software downloaded on a Windows PC to program the gateway. It does require a password and some other setup pieces to work, which I allude to in my article on the MasterVolt system I built on Grace. You'll have to program each MasterBus bit of data that you want to spit out onto the NMEA 2000 network, and vise versa, for any N2K data you want on MB. Somewhat of a tedious process, but it does work.

Upside though was discovering a lot of stuff has USB sockets on the back to allow for flash drive updating directly. Haven't done it yet but the Easyview and some B&G Triton's I've got will do it. So, yay for small things.

I've had this conversation with many folks I've worked with on consulting opportunities, or just in passing. Yes, you can network some of the more fringe-y devices like power systems and the like, but the industry has not made the tools and process streamlined for DIY'ers yet. In fact, I would argue that they haven't made it easy for normal installers! I've worked on pretty much every type of power system there is vendor-wise, and had the chance to learn from installers or on my own, and very few of them are easy to get all connected in the way that instruments and such are in the rest of the marine industry.

It is also very frustrating to me, as pretty much everything else we have on the boat relies on power, yet it is one of the least instrumented systems on the boat. There really should be a lot more that you know about your battery bank besides state of charge - you have tons more info about your engine and on your chart plotter.

The only vendor I've seen that has reasonably easy interfacing is Victron, and theirs has even gotten better in the last year and a half, making the current solutions from MasterVolt and others look really dated. I'm hopeful this trend will continue and other vendors will start baking it into their products.

There are also a lot of 3rd party products that can monitor the health of your electrical system, battery bank, charging sources and the like, and have networking capabilities. However, they are standalone systems not deeply integrated with Victron, MasterVolt, etc. and have shortfalls as well. It may be worth looking into a few of those for your situation though, if you're mainly looking for data about your system.

I have a lot of home automation gear and it's likewise rather fragmented. At least with homes there's a potentially much larger target customer base. With boats, in all honesty, there's nowhere near as large a potential customer base.

I already have some Mastervolt gear that's not malfunctioning so I'm inclined to stick with it. Were I starting fresh I'd give a harder look at Victron. I may still look into their Venus box as it has some interesting potential for other things too. But that's perhaps a whole other discussion. But for the near term my focus is just being ABLE to see data from the stuff I've got onboard, to start logging it, and potentially set up some alarm notifications.

What software should I use? it is MasterAdjust Software?

Could you give me a password to login with installer details?

I would be grateful if you could describe this process for us at least a little!

Thank you very much!

@denisrus that's quite a long process to document here. MasterVolt has some feedback in their software and documentation, and it really depends on what you're trying to do. Since their interface requires you to define things bidirectionally, the bigger challenge is defining what you want to come in / out of the bus.

I would check out their product page at -interfaces/masterbus-nmea2000-interface/ and look at the Downloads tab. MasterAdjust is the software needed to configure things. They have a manual for the interface too which could be helpful.

Hello @stevemitchell, thank you very much for your blog, it's very helpfull, i'm in a same process but on my side i never managed to find what i need (masteradjust installer code...) and before buying more component (masterbus to nmea bridge) i would like to be sure that i could get the info of my equipments (chargers, mli mastervolt batteries, mastervolt alternators) on my B&G(navico) chart plotters.

can you detailled a bit more your configuration of the masterbus to nmea component ?

TIA

@matelevante - I don't have access to that particular component anymore. When I did, it was pretty rudimentary and required mapping each individual NMEA 2000 PGN or message for each direction - from MasterVolt onto the NMEA 2000 network, and the other direction as well (if needed). I'm not sure if they support all of their newer products, but I would be surprised if they didn't. I would suggest checking MasterVolt's specifications and documentation.

I'll be updating this page after the ZCS 8.8 release is done to only reflect what is true in that version and future versions. It will also include information about the Zimbra_Suite_Plus modules where appropriate. If you currently are using the backup module for ZSP, please see Zimbra_Suite_Plus/Zimbra_Backup_Plus for now. The ZSP Backup module is an excellent tool for Moves, Migrations, etc.

Redundancy isn't magical and all choices have a "time" for the operation to failover and the application being used can restrict what can be done or increase the length of "time" of the operation. Timing of the operation is where the service/server has a client side impact of being "unavailable".

Two big picture objectives for "redundancy" are "data redundancy" for DR situations and "application" redundancy for service availability. Our "cluster" situation is an active-passive "redundancy" for the purposes of the mailstore application layer. The raid level of the disks on the san servers the "redundancy" in regards to data recovery for DR.

When you introduce the objective of having off-site redundancy the costs and issues become huge. Remote locations introduce speed issue for data transfers which will also impact performance for most applications as it tries to stay in sync between the two machines for write and roll-back purposes.

My intent wasn't so much to give specific answers to this question but rather demonstrate that to answers these questions you have to get down to the real specifics - it's simply impossible to answer the broad question of "how do I make redundant servers". It would take a book to fully explore all the issues and possibilities but it still comes down to - how much money you have to spend on the project. I use to work with High Performance Clusters and HA Linux+Oracle+SAP global deployments with TB's of data - this issue would arise daily for us in those environments.

This is your mail server, there is no higher profile application in your environment most likely than this box. You'll want to think 3 to 5 years down the road when you spec out the box. Make sure to confirm:

When I was working with HPC, I found there was never a good reason to NOT at least start with 32GB's of RAM. Now, a mail server isn't a HPC compute node - I understand that. But I would still try to spec out a system that has at least 8 memory slots (usually a ratio of x slots per cpu on system) but allows me to use 4 4GB DIMMS giving me 16GB of memory and allows an upgrade path choice of 4 more 4GB or 8GB DIMMS. Get the higher speed DIMMS, you can't mixed memory of different speeds.

Most motherboards will have integrated ethernet ports. If they are the same chipset then you might want to just channel bond these. What I have done in the past, is used them for management ports and added in network cards for production activity.

Ideally, I would buy two cards that had two ports (Gb). I would then channel bond 2 of the ports across the cards, for 2 separate bondings. I would use one of those bonds for "front facing" traffic and the other for "backup" traffic. Remember to consider the bus infrastructure and other cards when deciding on what ones to get.

This will require you to confirm your switches can do this. There are different choices when it comes to channel bonding and some of them require the switch to support it - it usually involves "bonding" on the switch side by configuring the ports in question.

The "production" bond is more in regards to failover. Make sure this happens as expected through the application layer. That proxies, firewall, and so forth allow on of the ports in the channel bond to go down without any end-user impact.

The backup port is for throughput. You'll want to map out the network path and switches to the end host that data is being moved to. You'll also need to confirm the network path actually gives you a gain in performance by doing the channel bonding.

You'll want to map out the network path and switches to the end host the data is being moved to. You'll also need to confirm the network path actually gives you a gain in performance by doing the channel bonding.

So far, physical devices have not featured native iSCSI interfaces on a component level. Instead, devices with SCSI Parallel Interface or Fibre Channel interfaces are bridged by using iSCSI target software, external bridges, or controllers internal to the device enclosure. Source

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