I’m not sure whether you are familiar with the concept of “dying gasp” but it would be very interesting to have it on the BR/MAX/balance devices.
It is used in DSL for example when the power is lost, a last signal is sent to mention to the other-end equipment that the device is powering off and that it is not simply the line that is cut. It helps a lot to avoid false alarms as you know that it is not due to physical layer issue but simply the user powering off his device.
Example: an HD4 could send a last message saying to incontrol that the device is shutdown. Instead of displaying “device offline”, we could then have “Device offline (power)”.
Understood. I agree this is useful if we are alway immediate device that connected to ISP.
I am thinking if dying gash not support by the device (e.g. modem) in front of Peplink, then this feature will not function. Do you think having UPS is a better option?
The request is not to avoid loss of power or to detect the dying gasp of the connected modem, it is to avoid false alarms.
As a service provider (SFA), if you are using mobile devices like BR1/HD2/HD4 not knowing if it was intentionally shutdown or if it lost all its connection is a problem.
Could be implemented along with a short battery life built into the device (10-20 seconds) to allow for brief losses of power in auto applications as well as changing power sources. Dying Gasp could be sent after power has been cut for say 10 seconds
If power is out, message should be sent asap. If afterwards, power comes back, it is not an issue as it will still report to InControl.
It is a long term request, it definitely needs hardware adaptation like a capacitor and a voltage-drop detection as well as a watchdog to get priority on data sent.
PS: I’m Paille, I still have issues with the 2 accounts not merged
I would like to revive this feature request and add my support for it as well. Plenty of commercial network hardware out there on the market right now has this feature and it is very invaluable to network administrators. Certainly everything that is mission Critical should be on a UPS, however, there are instances where UPS can fail, and it is helpful to know when power is lost definitively without sending someone on site to have to verify that. It would be helpful if InControl could receive these messages and notify administrators appropriately.
I’m the original author of the post. In the DSL world, this feature was brought by the chipset manufacturers, it was not managed by the DSL routers themselves. So unless the 5G modem manufacturers have implemented something like this, I don’t see how Peplink could do it. I was a bit too optimistic 10 years ago
We have found an alternative way to detect loss of power, we have direct visibility on all the signalling coming from the masts, provided by our global sim carriers. Based on the logs, we can detect when both cellular signals were lost at the same time and conclude on a power loss, same with Starlink now on top.
Extra alternative : send SMS to the simcard and see if it gets delivered but that might take some time and is not always accurate (sim change etc…).
Yes, the only confirmation you get that the device is powered is when you have a confirmation of reception… If nothing happens, you don’t know why. We send the sms though our global carriers, not through the complete regular channel, not sure if it has an influence. So, in some cases, it is an indication of end to end SMS capability, meaning electricity but issue on data layer (APN, coverage,outbound rules,…)
We have activated by default password protected SMS reboot on devices and it gives pretty good results. … Except that you can’t cancel a sms, so once all problems have been solved, sms arrives and reboots the router…
