I have requested several times over 6 months, and everyone always says its needed, yet it still doesnt show up in new SW releases.
NAT is a great feature for most residential customers and some business ones as well. Eliminating the little routers as a point of troubleshooting is nice. So, we know its a great feture. But…
Since our network has grown to 400+ SM’s, keeping 100% accuracy of IP usage is something we have to keep in focus. Not being able to ping the radio (WAN/public IP) doesn’t let us confirm what our DNS lists show us but our Public IP usages.
Also, since we monitor both radio and router IPs to make sure custs. are up as much as possible, not pinging the WAN IP ONLY for radios that are NAT’d is a pain to keep track of. We are buying 100 SM’s (at least) this month, so the problem will only get worse.
Not to pound the point home, but every little router you can buy anywhere can be pinged. Why can’t this feature be simply added to a much more capable device like Canopy.
If there is some design limitation that makes the feature impossible, then an explanation of that would at least let us know that they agree it is needed, but they just can’t do it.
Sorry for the rant, but I have emailed this to Tech Support at least 5 times.
Paul, PDMNet