Elevate in EXISTING network

Products ePMP
21
@Cambium_Sri wrote:

Barry, 

We've started to work on it. Its not trivial, so it won't be quick. We'll keep you posted. 

Thanks,

Sriram

Rather than trying to use the ubiquiti file what about allowing us to use a known good backup file from a cambium running the same version?

Most of our network is running DHCP so with the exception of the customer's name the bulk of our customers have the same config. It also minimises how much you have to worry about UBNT changing the config file.

I would be interested in this as if you could load a cambium config file into the firmware a very useful feature request would be to allow us to do the same to normal firmware which means that even if a SM defaults it will have a known good config which will probably allow it onto the network at least long enough for its final config to be applied (hopefully negating a truck roll).

From what I understand this was one of the uses of custom scripts with UBNT. If the two sections can be separated (config from firmware, e.g. store the config in the .data section of an ELF binary) the hash checks of the firmware don't have to be compromised (and will remain consistent across all networks). Secondly its a config file nothing executable should be in it hence you should also be able to avoid UBNT's current security issues.

22

Elevate : Great idea in the lab but it just doesn't work in the real word.

We need an image with our basic default requirements.

A tool to do this is a great idea but in the short term but is there an option for Cambium to create an image upon request from a network provider?

I can't see that it would take much effort to replace 2 fields and compile an new image.

Do the math:    1 hour of engineering time = 1000 elevate licenses = USD 31,500  in sales

and I’m sure I’m not the only that would immediately purchase licenses if it meant zero downtime to the existing customers on our EPMP access points.

Does anybody else agree?

23

If they would just enable "open" by default on ePMP Elevate, the need for being able to pre-configure anything would be a complete non-issue for me.

All I would need to do would be to switch off WPA2 on the AP while I'm adding Elevate devices - then once I'm done and the new radios are all configured properly, turn WPA2 back on, and all is well. The only downtime involved would be the time it takes for all the existing customers to reconnect after turning WPA2 off.

Any other settings can be dealt with as part of the upgrade process on each device individually, but having it able to connect to the AP is kind of important. Is there really anything else that you actually need pre-configured other than the WPA2 key?

1 Like
24
@Larry Weidig wrote:

Wow, wonder who that "somebody" might be.  That would be a workable solution I would think and allow for easy migration to the new system on a client by client basis without providing any interruption to any other clients on either of the systems.

Make sure if somebody writes that tool it would save the congifuration at well so that if we mass push it out and then for one reason or anoither the radio is rebooted it would not lose these changes.

Thanks!

Somebody did it and put it on github :)

https://github.com/m0sia/elevator

25

Can you please explain the sm.json file format and possible values?  Is it capable of taking other optiions?

26

Hi Larry,

Yes, it will accept other options, but there is no proper format description.

In order to get configuration file with other options you can do the trick explained by Mathew in other topic:

http://community.cambiumnetworks.com/t5/ePMP-Elevate/Preconfiguring-elevated-radios/m-p/69096#U69096

1) Elevate an UBNT radio on the bench (you're going to want physical access to it)

2) once it's up and running with the ePMP elevate firmware, configure with all the necessary settings for a generic template that will be able to connect to your network, and save the settings (you could do this for each individual customer, if you have settings like PPPoE that are unique for every customer, but that would be very time consuming and doesn't make sense to me... you could probably also manually edit the config files for each customer, but I don't want to get into that - using a generic template seems simpler to me).

3) downgrade to UBNT firmware through the ePMP web interface (do not use the tftp method to get back to UBNT firmware, as that would erase everything).

4) Use an SCP client to get "/etc/persistent/mnt/.configured_3.2" file from the radio and use it as sm.json