So… this is probably one of those things where I just don’t understand something that lots of other people have a use for or that there is a reason it has to be the way it is.
On the Onboard pane the MAC is the ethernet MAC not the Wireless MAC and of course this breaks makes something that would have been easy… not easy… at least for us. Are some / many / most Cambium customers using the Ethernet MAC instead of the the Wireless Interface ?
So I guess I’m just curious, is having the Ethernet interface on the Onboarding panel actually useful to anyone ? Is there a good reason cnM does this ?
It’s the management MAC of the SM (same MAC on the main page of the SM and in cnMaestro dashboard). That way you can find it on the port of the ethernet switch/router easily for filtering, radius, etc.
I was always under the impression that the management interface is bound to the Wireless interface, not the ethernet interface.
Both the wireless MAC and the Ethernet MAC are on the main page of the SM. You are correct that it is the MAC shown on the cnM dashboard but again…why ?
The port of what switch/router ? The SM’s ethernet port is connected to the customer’s switch/router not the WISP’s. It’s the wireless interface the WISP’s side of the network sees. When I look at the switch, bridge table, PPPoE sessions, radius, everything is the Wireless MAC.
Edit: I can’t count the times we have hunted down a mystery SM by it’s Wireless MAC because every part of the network that sees a MAC address sees the Wireless MAC. Other than looking on the radio itself, or now cnMaestro, the ethernet MAC does not appear anywhere and has absolutely no use to us. How do you have your radios/network set up that the Ethernet MAC from the customer side of the radio is showing up on your switches and routers ?
We use PMP450M and PMP450i. If I open an SM, the MAC listed on the pages of the SM matches the bridging table N10 (Eth0 Mgmt). On the AP switch, if I look up MACs passing, it shows that same MAC address as N10 Eth0 Mgmt on the SM. Now maybe this really is the wireless, but the Cambium SM calls it the Ethernet in the bridging table. Let me try dumping a tech support file because it might break it down better as to which is wireless and which is ethernet.
Edit: tech support and manual didn’t have anything decisive about this. Maybe someone from Cambium can chime in.
Hmmm we have mostly ePMP and a couple hundred 450i. But 450 doing it differently would explain why cnM works this way. I do know that 450 and even old Canopy do not handle the management vs the public interface the same way ePMP does.
Sorry for the inconvenience, CnMaestro displays the Ethernet MAC across all the pages like inventory, onboarding page and dashboards. Wireless MAC displaying only in the details page.
Will discuss with internal development team, and will raise a future enhancement for showing the wireless MAC in inventory page to search for ePMP SM.
We can search with the wireless MAC in the tree, which will show the result for that device.