Troubleshooting guide — Kerlink Wirnet Gateways for the Helium Network

Troubleshooting guide

General Information

The gateway contains the Kerlink OS called KerOS, and on top of that the Helium software (composed of an Erlang runtime package and the Miner for the full miner, or the Light Miner package).
The software is automatically and remotely managed, it is not user serviceable. You don't need to worry about it.

The Full Miner communicates over a peer-to-peer (P2P) network and needs to connect to the remote port 44158. Hence, other miners must have this port forwarded to their miner IP address, and so should you. Indeed, other miners will want to connect to your miner too.
This is explained in detail in the Helium documentation:

The behavior of the Full Miner is to keep the blockchain in sync, and mine HNT through the LoRa radio:

This means that when cold started, the miner will download a snapshot (a package containing recent blocks, the list of gateways on the network, etc) and ingest it. Once done, and at any point in time, the miner will receive blocks over the P2P network and ingest them.
In parallel, the LoRa radio is constantly listening to nearby packets and sends them to the Helium network in two ways: either it's a paid packet, and your miner will try to sell it and get paid for it; or it's a beacon transmitted by another miner, in which case your miner will try to know who challenged it, try to contact it (and hope it's not relayed!) to tell it "I saw this beacon". Later, a validator will process the transaction sent by the challenger and all parties will get rewards.
Also in parallel (using both of the above), the miner may receive a challenge over the P2P network and send a beacon to the LoRa radio. Any nearby miner may receive it and process it (see bullet 2).

Sources of information

Helium Explorer is an immensely useful tool to self-diagnose and troubleshoot your miner. However, it comes with a few caveats:

the sync state is not updated very often
the relay state is not updated very often
in general, the API height is not always accurate

So, if you want the best information, please use:

Helium Explorer for...
- Beacons: see if you challenged, get challenged, and witnessed challenges
- All activity: see more detailed beacons information
- Rewards: rolling 24h, 7d and 30d windows
- Rewards: see individual reward transactions
This onboarding dashboard for...
- The sync state
- The current miner height
- The last time the miner was seen alive
- The last block age
- The P2P status
Any other online tool may be also as reliable as this dashboard or explorer (especially to ping, detect relay/p2p status, etc). They are very good third party tools that can provide useful insights.

Self diagnostic

Check the following on your dashboard (enter your public key here):

all values are updated every 15 minutes, so you should be able to have data less than 15 min old
Connectivity must show a recent date
Blockchain API height may be wrong, it is informative and safe to ignore (it comes from the Helium Explorer API)
Miner height is important, it shows what is the height of the last ingested block
Miner last block age is the most important KPI, it must be under 30 minutes
P2P information is informative, and you should take action if the P2P NAT type is not "none"
Software versions is informative only, you don't need to worry about it