Weeks #13 & #14 summary

The flu got its toll, so I have to squeeze two weeks to this post, as there was nothing to tell about the progress in week #13, there was essentially none. And instead the day by day progress of week #14 this post will be a how-to. A how-to test our cloud controller, because

The beta is here!

In this post I will guide you through the process of setting up your Altiwi network. I will try to do it by some concise way and I also describe what does not work that well now, just for you to avoid dead paths.

Most of the last week and a half was spent on hardening the firmware, especially to be able to work with any of the ethernet ports connected and also to add real support to most of the hardware. There are some models we simply do not have available, if you need support for any of the following access points, please drop me a note, we will try to build a firmware for them but right now with no possibility to test it on site, so it might take some effort from your side to make things working. We are ready to help you as much as possible. This concerns mainly of those pieces of hardware:

OM5P
OM5P-AN - you may test it as OMP5-AC, please give us a note if that worked
MR600 - you may test it as MR900, dtto

We have no unit of that type available for testing. On the other hand, here is a list of tested and supported access points so far:

OM2P-LC
OM2P
OM2P-HS
OM5P-AC
MR900
MR1750
A40
A60
A42
A62

In cases where do exist more than one revision of hardware, eg. OM2P, OM2Pv4, for example, the firmware used should be the same. If something goes wrong, drop me a note, we will sort it out.

Disclaimer

This is a beta software. Although we put a considerable effort to design it with security in mind, be advised, that there are some security features bypassed to make the development iterations easier. Namely, the access points has the mutual Cloud console to AP authentication turned off in this early beta phase, so the keys are not in use when AP accesses the cloud dashboard. That said, the product is not intended to production environment, if you will use it that way you are doing it only at your own risk!

So how do I start?

First, you need some Open-Mesh access point you want to reflash with our firmware. Don’t worry, if you will not be happy with the outcome, you can always reflash your device back to stock firmware and use it with Cloudtrax :-)

Second, you need to register at https://beta.altiwi.com, via using the Sign up button. The e-mail address provided will be used as your login name. And because this address is also used to pre-populate your Organization name, it is wise, but not required, to use your company e-mail adddress. After the registration, you will receive simple e-mail with link to activate your account. This e-mail will come from welcome@altiwi.com and your account will not work unless you click the confirmation link inside.

After your first login, You will be asked for your Organization name, street address and time zone. Organization name will be pre-populated, but you can alter the name as you wish. The street address is used to drive you to your location on the map later, when you will place the access points, and also to derive your time zone. Later it will be also used for setting the regulatory domain, but this feature is not implemented yet. So although you can leave the Street address blank or fill in some nonsense, it is in your best interest to fill the correct one :-) If you decide not to use Street address, you can manually select the Time Zone. The time zone is important, because the time zone affects the time of automatic updates etc.

Next step is to add at least one WiFi. WiFi, in our terminology, is the name of the wireless network your clients will see on their devices when choosing the network to connect to. So you can cllick at Add WiFi and choose your network name and password. Again, you can alter the pre-populated values, if you wish. The first network you are creating is always the secure one, connected to your local network with access to local resources and the name is derived from your organization name.

After creating your first WiFi, you can either add another, or proceed to the next step — adding the access point. The access point is the actual hardware that connects your clients to the network, to gain the wireless access, you need obviously at least one.

Adding the access point

So by pressing the Add access point button you will be presented Add Access Point screen, where you need to fill-in the access point MAC address (can be found on the back sticker of the device and also on side of the box). You also need to select the Access Point type, from the drop down and by clicking on the map indicate the AP’s physical location.

Scanning the access point QR code with laptop’s camera

Note 1: As we do not have the access to Open-Mesh device database, you need to select the device type. When there will be Altiwi access points available, the console will automatically select the proper AP type based on the MAC address entered.

Note 2: Please note the green Scan button. If you do not want to fill in the MAC address manually, you can scan the QR code on the back of the device. This will use your mobile device rear camera, in case you use the mobile phone, or the front camera, if you are using your laptop. The mobiles’ rear cameras are usually quite good when trying to focus small QR codes on the back of Open-Mesh devices, the laptops’ front cameras are usually not that good. The Altiwi devices will make use of large enough QR codes to be usable even on laptops (this was something I really mised on Cloudtrax), but when using O-M devices, the Scanning from the laptop computer might not work. Be advised, that you will be asked to allow access to the camera of your device. Also, if you have some device that allows blocking access with no questions (like for example Windows Mobile do), be sure that you allowed the beta.altiwi.com to use the camera.

Note 3: Open-Mesh started to use QR codes from the MR series access points I believe, the bar codes on the OM series access points will not work.

From now on it should be enough to plug your device to the network, wait for boot and grab the configuration and start serving clients.

This will be definitelly true when the Altiwi devices will be available, but because we are testing with Open-Mesh devices, there is another step required — flashing the device with Altiwi firmware.

Flashing the devices

When you click the device’s MAC address from the main page, you will get to the Edit Access Point page, where you can find the yellow Flash manually button. By clicking on that button you will get to the firmware download page, where you will be presented the WinPCAP utility download, flashing utility download and a list of available firmwares for your particular AP type. The latest firmware is on top, please use only the latest, unless you will not be advised otherwise. When in production, there will be only the last production and latest beta firmware, but for now, in the beta stage, you might need other than the latest :-)

Flash manually button will take you to proper firmware download page

Latest firmware is always on top. Here it is version 0.0.39

The exact process of flashing the firmware is written in the Documentation (also linked on this firmware flashing page), but here is the outline:

First, you need a Windows machine. If you are using Mac or Linux, contact me, and I will help you with this (I use Mac and Ubuntu for development, so it is not a big deal).

Before you can use the flashing utility, you will need to have WinPCAP installed. Chances are, that you have one already, if you did Open-Mesh flashing of used WireShark recently, if not, download it, install and you can forget it :-)

Second — if you will use any of the 5GHz capable access points, you will need to unlock it. The exact procedure is described in the Documentation and differs for the A62 model. All others are the same.

The flashing utility is a command-line program, which will need 2 parameters: First will be the interface number (you can get it by runing the flash utility without any parameters — you are looking for your wired network adapter. Second parameter is the file name of the Altiwi firmware, eg.

a42-factory.bin

So the actual process of flashing firmware will be something like:

open-mesh-flash-ng.exe 1 a42-factory.bin

Then, and only then, you can connect the power to the device and wait for flashing. It is important to have the utility running before the device gets powered as the bootloader asks for firmware only in few seconds after the power up and then starts the boot sequence. This is not a big deal if you are flashing OM or MR devices and do have the external power source ready. The easiest way of achieving this with A4x/6x series was to use separate PoE injector, interconnect the cables and then plug the power in. Another way is to use PoE switch only for flashing purposes, so the swicth is not connected anywhere, only two cables are plugged in. One leads to the computer you are flashing from, the other is plugged to the device.

Wait of “Device ready for unplug” message and you are done.

Generally, the process is identical as the Open-Mesh reflash, so if you did this at least once, the only difference is the second parameter with the name of the firmware you have downloaded.

Operation notes

As stated many times on this blog, we focused only to achieving the most essential features of Cloudtrax in the first wave, so if you cannot find something in the UI, it is probably because it is not there :-) Anyway, the system should be capable of following:

Creating multiple networks, each with multiple SSIDs (We call them WiFis), that can be either bridged to the LAN (the secure network), act as Internet only network, or as Captive portal network.

Internet only and Captive networks are always set to have access only to the internet and cannot connect to local network. Also they have the Isolation mode enabled by default. The aim is to find the best scenario, it does not make much sense to us to provide Internet only access and let the isolation mode off, for example.

What should work is the mesh capability, with two limitations:

1. The meshing is always done on 2.4 GHz, just like it used to be in Cloudtrax recently. We expect to use also the 5GHz band for meshing later, but right now the priority is to get things working.
2. Right now it is not advisable to make first boot of the meshing device with power only. Rather boot it up connected to a cable, let it contact the console, and then you can freely disconnect it, move it around, reboot, it should work. But the inital process of first boot in alone mode is quite edgy right now and will need some improvements. Generaly it is something what already worked but I broke it during the firmware hardening process in last two weeks.

What does not work?

There are some corners of the UI, which seems like they shoudl do someting, but in fact they don’t. Here is the list of what I am aware of:

1. Site survey scan — looks like it des not do anything. In fact it does, but the result cannot by seen by the user, for now
2. Client list — you cannot see the connected clients right now. Also the blocked list does not do anything yet.
3. Configure > Upgrade firmware — the autoupdates does not work. You can save the new firmware for your network, but there is no way to autoupgrade the network. But the green button Upgrade now works fine.
4. Cloudtrax import — the import of the settings to the Altiwi dashboard basically works. But if you try to actually import the settings to a new network, if works only partially and you are getting into unknown territory. For example — if you already have the network with the same name, its settings will probably be overwritten with no questions asked. Also, if you accidentally used one of your Cloudtrax devices as an Altiwi one, did not delete it from Cloudtrax and tried to import network which contains such device, you might, under certain circumstances, go into bunch of validation errors, or even UI crashes. Basically you cannot import anything what could already be in the Altiwi dashboard. We plan to advise you to do thorough testing when this part will get better. Also — the Flash button in Cloudtrax networks does nothing.
5. The traffic graphs are showing nonsense. Basically, the access points send up random data.
6. The LEDs. Basically the LEDs are left on their own. No color coding the various states etc…

What works?

Simply put — all the rest. We are running the altiwi network in our office for more than 2 months right now and despite of some minor breaks caused by development issues, we run our wifi pretty smoothly. So if you just setup your network and connect your devices to it, you should see no difference for your clients. Right now, during the beta phase we will focus on fixing the things you will report as not working, the Cloudtrax import feature and also some backend changes, which are important for scaling.

Basically we would like to have sorted out all the issues you will report and those listed on what does not work paragraph above. It should work. We do not expect adding much more features, except probably the VLAN support, which seems to be quite important during the beta. As already stated, we would like to keep things tight and have a fully functional product, before we start adding features.

And the aim of this beta is to help us to provide a stable product. Hope you will help us to polish it during the beta phase. All your bug reports, suggestions, questions will be eagerly awaited at rob.h@altiwi.com.

Thank you!

Robert