Technician experience on cnArcher Dec. 21, 2017

Products cnArcher
1

 Here are a few notes from my installation technician:

"In my time using the CnArcher application Beta 2017/11/03 I have grown to love it. I come from a satellite technician background and the GUI is very similar to the interface used on the Applied Instruments Super Buddy Satellite Meter (SBSM). It gives good, detailed information regarding dBm, SnR, Frequency, and color code. It's relatively simple to use and get everything set up including, firmware updates, factory resets, even down to the customer's very name. In using this tool, I have improved my customer's overall experience compared to using the headphones as my only pointing utility. There are, however, a few bugs (Or possibly unimplemented features) I've experienced that I think would make this already excellent application an even more invaluable tool.


Equipment we use are the 450d, 450b for Subscriber Modules utilizing the PowerLINK for power and wifi. 450i, 450m for Access Points. Application loaded on a Samsung Galaxy J3 (SM-J327A), Android Version 7.0


  • The application does not apply region or continent information to the SM, requiring access from our Access Points after the installation has been completed.

  • For whatever reason, there is a failure in applying our cnMaestro information to the SM. Upon further inspection, it appears that the cnArcher application is applying "cnMaestro_On_Premises" to the user name field under the cnMaestro tab. When changed to reflect the correct information, the SM still refuses to connect, stuck in a loop of "Will connect in x"

  • Upon completion of the installation and having entered the Site Name and VLAN, the application attempts to get "SesStatus" but loses the connection to the SM itself.

  • On some occasions, the application will not connect to the SM under any circumstance. Even after Factory Reset, Firmware Upgrade, etc.


As a final thought, a nice addition to the feature set would be an easy way to use the application to repoint SM units that were installed before this utility was in our hands. Thank you very much for the opportunity to test this already wonderful application and we look forward to see what improvements may come."

3 Likes
2

Thank you for trying out cnArcher beta and providing detailed feedback. Please do update to the latest version that was posted couple of days back, if the phone has not updated it automatically already.

The default behaviour of the SM is that it inherits the region/country settings from the AP automatically. So there is no need to explicitly set this. Is there a specific reason you want to set this on the SM itself? Maybe to get rid of the warning message in the SM GUI? If so, you should include this setting in the configuration that is being pushed by cnMaestro.

There is a known issue where cnArcher fails to select and apply a template configuration to the SM. This happens when the template does not contain any "variables". This will be fixed very soon in the next update. But from your  description, it does not look like this is what you are running into.

To help us troubleshoot why cnMaestro configuration is not being pushed correctly, can you send us the debug logs from cnArcher immediately following a failure? You can do this by selecting "Report a bug" from the cnArcher menu. Select "email" as the mechanism to  share, and you will be able to email out the debug logs as attachment.

There are two reason why cnArcher loses connectivity with the SM after it has fully configured the SM, one is by design, and the other is a bug.

When cnArcher starts the install, it enables the "Native IP" feature on the SM so that it can continue to talk to 169.254.1.1 even if the SM's IP address changes during the install. The app also configures a static IP in the 169.254.1.x subnet on the smartphone to talk to the SM. Once the SM configuration is complete, the app changes the smartphone to be a DHCP client. This is to allow it to talk to cnMaestro server and onbard the SM.  Once the IP address of the smartphone changes, it no longer knows how to talk to 169.254.1.1. So you will no longer see the SM status displayed at the top of the screen. This is by design.

Once the SM is onboarded to cnMaestro, the install is complete and the app switches the smartphone back to the 169.254.1.x static IP. But there is an issue with PMP where if VLAN is configured on the SM and the SM is connected to an AP, SNMP requests to the native IP of 169.254.1.1 will fail. This is the bug, and we are looking into how to  fix this on PMP.

If you see instances where the app is not able to talk to the SM even after factory reset, please open the web browser on the smartphone and see if you can navigate to http://169.254.1.1. You can also try to disable the "mobile data" or 4G connection on the smartphone. Some versions of Android will not switch over to using the Wi-Fi connection because it sees that the 4G connection has internet access, which the Wi-Fi connection does not have internet access.

We do plan to make the app usable to "reinstall" an already installed SM. For this, the bug mentioned above needs to be fixed, and the app also needs to work when the SM does not have default credentials.

3

Experienced the issue again today, however it appears it was just the 450d needing to be factory reset. I have sent an email with the debug log anyway. Going forward, do I need to clear the cache for the application on my phone so it doesn't generate a super long history in the log? I noticed it contained numberous dates and was just curious if it'd be easier to clear it now so next time it doesn't date back past today?

4

There is a 15MB limit for the debug log.