January 31st update v1.0.6

Today I had a pretty weird experience with an SM that failed to save half the frequencies and didn't save any SNMP or GPS information while using cnArcher. Also, I had an idea relevant to this update, in this update it was changed to make the "Color Code 1" populate instead of staying 0 with the CCs going into the "Additional Color Codes" list. Would it be better for the "CC 1" slot to stay as a 0 like before? Being in an area with high and ever-changing noise floors, we have to move customers from AP to AP every once in a while. It made it much easier to swap them as we didn't have to reboot the SM every single time, we'd just run an AP evaluation. I also can't upload the bug report, so I sent it in an email.

Kaleb_Skyber,

We got the bug report and will investigate. Just want to confirm that the SM was using factory default configuration when you started. cnArcher expects to be able to login to the GUI without any credentials, and that the "SNMP community string 1" is set to "Canopy". 

There are two reasons we moved from using "Additional color codes" to "Color code 1".

1. In our lab, some engineers configure their AP to operate on color code 0. When this happens, the SM that cnArcher configures to connect to another color code, ends up connected to the AP with color code 0. While this situation may not be common in the field, when it happens, cnArcher is no longer able to control the SM.

2. Another customer looked at our earlier implementation and asked why we were using "Additional color codes" when we should be using "Color code 1".

The goal of cnArcher is to configure the SM radio so it connects to the AP and configure the network settings on the SM so that cnMaestro or whatever mechanism you are using to provision the SM can do that. It is not intented to fully configure the SM. If you are using cnMaestro, cnArcher will allow you to select a configuration template to be pushed to the SM and change the configuration to what you want. 

Yes, I had reset the SM to factory defaults from the SM information screen on the cnArcher application. The problem we have with cnMaestro is that any SM we set up using the cnArcher application will not connect, even after logging into the GUI manually and changing any settings around it.


Edit: Inside Logs > Device Agent Log there is this message that is only present on the devices that we install using the cnArcher application
"02/14/2018 : 10:45:06 CST : : OpenConnection to <cnmaestro ip>:443 failed 
02/14/2018 : 10:45:06 CST : : Rand_bytes failed, error code : 0 
02/14/2018 : 10:45:06 CST : : Unable to discover cnMaestro URL (re-discover in 61 seconds)"

Also, attached is a screenshot of what a pre-archer cnmaestro page looks like compared to devices we use Archer on. It appears that any attempt to change the settings manually also does not work, such as changing IP address or different credentials. The left side is an pre and right side is archer. It appears that it applies "cnmaestro_on_premises" into the Cambium ID slot and leaves AccountID blank. In the photo on the right side, we had attempted to make it connect by changing to the proper credentials, to no avail.

Here is what we think is happening with the missing frequencies.

1. On the alignment screen, the app reconfigures the scan list to just the frequency and bandwidth of the connected AP. This is done so that if you turn the SM too much and it disconnects from the AP, it will reconnect fast as soon as you turn it back, and not g thouugh the full scan list. Once you move away fom the alignment page, the app configured the full scan list on the SM.

2. In your case, you have all of 5.4GHz and 5.7GHz selected. The app takes more than 10 second to restore this scan list using SNMP. We founda race condition where this may not always complete, leaving you with a partial scan list.

To confirm this theory, can you reduce your scan list to a few frequencies and try?

For the second problem of the SM not being able to connect to cnMaestro, the message "OpenConnection to <cnmaestro ip>:443 failed" indicates that the SM cannot reach the cnMaestro IP address.

Can you try to ping the cnMaestro IP from the SM? Go to "Tools > Ping Test" in the SM GUI.

Ran the PING test but never got a reply from the address. To confirm I went through more of the SMs we set up using cnArcher and again, all those didn't receive a reply from the address either. All the ones set up manually receive a reply within 100ms. All SMs tested are also on the same APs as well.

It seems like some specific network configuration needed for L3 connectivity is not being set correctly with cnArcher. Can you export the configuration from a working SM and a non-working SM and do a diff. You can export the configuration from the GUI by going to "Configuration > Unit Settings > Download Configuration File" section.

If you don't find anything useful, can you also forward the configuration files to me at rajesh.vijayakumar@cambiumnetworks.com? Please remove passwords, PSK, RADIUS shared secret etc before forwarding.

I'll have those config files over to you shortly, thank you sir.

We figured out that it was the setting inside of cnArcher for the IP setting that was not allowing connection to cnMaestro. If we have the SM configured to a Public IP with the DHCP disabled, it works just fine with cnMaestro.

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