Diagnostic shell?

Product Discussion Peplink Balance
1

I’m working with my first Peplink and I’m having a hard time finding diagnostic tools that I’d normally be going to as a first step in troubleshooting with other routers (Cisco, Mikrotik, Ubnt, etc.). I found an ssh shell, but it seems to be a bit restricted. Also not clear if this forum represents official product support included in the purchase price or not…

Here are things I’m looking for:

  • Ping via command-line (web UI is too clunky)
  • Ability to see MAC addresses of each VLAN interface (I totally can’t find this anywhere, was hoping “ifconfig” or “arp” commands were available in CLI, can’t find them)
  • Ability to see interface status and statistics (beyond up/down, would like to see duplex and speed, error counts, etc. - again basic ifconfig)

Can anyone point me to where I can find all this? I really don’t see how you can effectively troubleshoot without this basic stuff being available.

2

Hi - anyone?

I’m really feeling lost without my tools here, and each day I’m wasting time clicking around during this initial period of getting this site setup. Is there any way to get a real shell?

3

Some degree of diagnostic tools on the Peplink product range are there but they are hidden.

Perhaps the most useful for your right now will be the support.cgi page. You can get to this by logging into the device and changing the url to http(s):///cgi-bin/MANGA/support.cgi

A new set of diagnostic tools was announced earlier this week at the European Peplink Summit, they will be available in fw 7.1.1 which is due very soon.

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4

There is no CLI everything is done via the web GUI.

5

Not entirely true. There is currently a CLI /SSH interface, but it is read only.

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6

Well I just went through the entire Engineer training manual and the term “CLI” does not come up once nor does any mention of a command line. The only command line shown is the Windows command line doing ping tests. I’ve never seen this before and it’s not mentioned in the Peplink Sales Engineer training modules at all. So not sure how a normal person is supposed to know about this.

7

I see that there’s now detailed interface stats in support.cgi, that’s good to see.

I’d still love to see those same interface stats, ping, traceroute and a simple arp to IP mapping in the CLI. I’m still not seeing any way to get the per-VLAN interface MAC addresses though, CLI or web.

Oh, also, at least in 7.1.0, there’s a bug with ssh access. The tooltip help says that the same user/pass used for the web interface is used for ssh access. This is not the case. We make a habit of changing “admin” usernames when possible and even after a reboot I can only ssh in with the original “admin” username, not the one we changed it to.

9

The SSH “admin” username bug will be fixed on 7.1.1 GA. Currently 7.1.1 beta doesn’t have this fix yet but fix applied is under test.

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