QR Codes, notifications and more

Altiwi development runs on full steam these days and there are couple of new features I’d like to share with you.

Printable WiFi password page with QR code

Maybe you have seen this number of times — the free WiFi in a conference orrom or even some hotel or venue was written by hand just on the flipchart next to a big screen. We decided to provide an easy way to share your connection info for your guests or partners via printable WiFi page, which you can print right away from the console.

Just click the Print QR button to get printable password page with QR code

Just print the page and hang it on a visible place :-)

And to make the things easier, in case your guest has a mobile device with QR reader (iOS has this by default in its camera app, from version 12 I guess), the page contains even a QR code for easy connection. Just snap and connect, no password hassle. Nice!

Note — if you are missing the page on some SSIDs, it is probably right. The Enterprise and Captive SSIDs do not use it as it does not make sense in such cases.

Access point connection status

We also improved the display of access point status to be visible right away. Now you can see a green badge next to your AP if it is connected to the dashboard and red badge, if disconnected. Furter, we added the meshing status with green Gateway, yellow repeater (with a white badge number to show number of hops) or Blue “No Mesh” in case the meshing has been turned of for this particular network.

Hope these small improvements help you to see your network status at a glance.

E-Mail notifications

One feature that has got a “blocking” status in your tracking system was e-mail notifications. So we added e-mail notifications which had its UI from day one but till now did not make anything.

How it works?

First — you need to enable notification by checking the proper checkbox in the Configure > Network page. The notification is then sent to your account e-mail address unless you choose to divert it to other e-mail, maybe your NOC, for example. In such case, just fill-in the e-mail field under the Send alerts checkbox.

Setting the e-mail notifications

The notifications shloud then come from notifications@altiwi.com

Second — the Access Point status is evaluated each hour and is supposed to work following way:

1. in case there is not notifiation enabled, do nothing
2. in case the node is new (not connected yet), do nothing
3. in case there is notification enabled, and the node has not reported to the dashboard for more than 2 hours, send the node down alert and keep track that the notification has been sent to avoid e-mail flooding
4. in case the node got connected to the dashboard and was previously reported as down, send notification that the node is up again and clear the tracking info so the subsequent eventual node down should be reported again

I’d like you to test the feature, if you can, as I sincerelly hope there is not any issue with the logic, as the last thing I’d like to see would be flooding your mailboxes with bogus notifications. If any of this would happen, please let me know ASAP to fix it.

Last note — there are some devices that fall into the notification down alert status now, but they were marked just as the notification has been already sent. I plan to clear the tracking info tomorrow, so you can expect one alert per each disconnected device you might have. This alert should not repeat until the device reconnects to the console. And again — shall the e-mail go wild, please contact me at rob.h(at)altiwi.com, I will fix it. It is always a bit adrenaline when rolling out anything automated, which is e-mail related :-)

Conclusion

We added three nice touches to your cloud managed WiFi platform. Those are:

• Printable WiFi password pages with QR codes
• Improved the access point’s status display
• Added e-mail notifications

Hope you will like it and again, huge THANK YOU for all the growing number of testers!