Chirpstack Mesh - Relay Gateway clock not synced, does it matter?

Question

Hey everyone,

We recently deployed a Mesh system involving 1 border gateway and 2 relay gateways. The relays aren't connected to internet.
When we first installed the relay, we synced relay time to browser time. Now on the Chirpstack Server, I'm seeing the relays show as offline with the old timestamp (ie. date and time when we first installed it - about 2 weeks ago). I'm assuming the relay clocks have gone out of sync.

My questions here are:

a. Does this matter? We're receiving uplinks from devices via the relays just fine. Will the border gateway continue to receive and transmit these uplinks even when the relay clocks are way out sync (eg. like 1 year behind)?

b. Can we send a downlink to the relay to set its clock remotely?

Thanks.

Orne Brocaar · Answer

It should not matter if the clock is out-of-sync, but events (like the heartbeat) might carry the wrong timestamp. This is not critical.

Probably the easiest option would be (if available) is to sync the clock using a GPS receiver through gpsd. Alternatively, you could use the commands framework to sync using downlink commands. This is something you need to configure yourself, see: https://www.chirpstack.io/docs/chirpstack-gateway-mesh/commands.html.

Chirpstack Mesh - Relay Gateway clock not synced, does it matter?

1 Answers