Hello,
My company has hundreds of Cambium 100/450 AP's deployed, and I was wondering if it would be beneficial to leave auto-update enabled on the AP's so that when new customers are connected their antennas will upgrade to the latest version of software right away? I thought there was some sort of performance impact but I honestly do not remember.
If anyone has any input on this it would be greatly appreciated!
Thanks,
Ryan
Fourway.net
When Autoupdate is enabled, the AP will monitor the SMs periodically checking that the version match what they are supposed to be running. If they don't match, it will start an upgrade process for the mismatched SMs.
There is no real major downside to leaving this on in the background to cover situations like you describe below, and it is a good way to make sure all SMs eventually get upgraded. If you are concerned about too many SMs updating at once, you can limit it via settings in CNUT. If you are using the AP as the file server, you may want to limit this to 4 or less. if you are using CNUT as the file server, or an external TFTP server, it then depends on your IP accessibility of the SMs. If they are left at Private, then they will use the AP as a proxy for file transfer which will tax the AP during the file transfer if you allow too many SMs to go simultaneously. If they are set to Public, then they will be able to access the file server directly and there will be no noticeable impact on the AP above normal network traffic.
If you are planning to leave autoupdate on for an extended period, I'd also suggest limiting the concurrent updates to 4 or less to have minimal system impact to customer data handling.
We have a dedicated computer that we can use for just keeping autoupdate enabled on the SM's, and we were thinking of leaving it on all of the time so that they are always up to date. Your answer to my questions helped very much, thanks!