Hello Peplink Community,
I am currently managing a fleet of over 1,400 MAX BR1 devices. For our tracking infrastructure, we rely on the GPS Forwarding feature to send NMEA sentences to a remote server.
To distinguish devices on the receiver side, we have historically used the “Vehicle ID” field, populating it with the last 4 bytes of the device serial number. However, these last 4 bytes of the serial number started to overlap and to resolve this problem I had to do changes on the receiver side, but also manually set the “Vehicle ID” to unique values - and this had to be done device by device!
These solutions might fix my current hurdles, but I am not really sure if they’re scalable and universal in the future. What if I add a new device that ends the same as the values I have already set manually? This is not guaranteed and I will have to go through the process again and again… This adds a lot of overhead and scalability risk when dealing with large fleets.
The Request:
Is it possible in the next firmware updates to finally allow the full Serial Number to be used as the identifier in the NMEA sentence, rather than being limited to a 4-byte/4-character Vehicle ID? Alternatively, allowing the Router Name (which we already manage via InControl2) to be used as a variable in the GPS Forwarding settings would also solve this issue.
Has anyone else found a more automated way to handle this at scale, or is a firmware update the only path forward?
I look forward to hearing the community’s and Peplink Engineering’s thoughts.