Credit for this article goes to @mldowling of Rising Connection, Australia
Peplink have hidden several of the menus until you add in equipment that is capable of the menu’s features. Pre-configuring of these can help tremendously with doing large project roll outs. The Hiding of the menus has been done to help simplify the on boarding process for new people and their devices.
For those that need to do more advanced pre-deployment work, all of the features are available, though you need to do a few tricks to get to them.
We do not recommend doing this unless you a pre-building for a large or complex roll out and are very competent in Peplink products such as a Certified Peplink Engineer.
Some of the more experienced people may choose to skip the organisation and group creation and go straight to the “” Section below titled Hidden Menus.
This article was written partly in response to these forum enquiries.
https://forum.peplink.com/t/moving-of-devices-from-an-organisations-group-to-a-brand-new-organisation-profile-within-incontrol2/7897?u=mldowling
https://forum.peplink.com/t/pre-build-profile-in-ic2-that-contains-location/5902?u=mldowling
##Creating your new Organisation
Login to your existing InControl2 account
After loggin in, go to the URL of https://incontrol2.peplink.com/login/create_organization
Fill in the required details and location
- Organisation Name
- Country
- Address
- With the Google map, either
a) zoom in and drag map to required location, double click to move drop pin
b) enter the GPS coordinates (you can use maps.google.com to convert to this format is unknown) - choose a unit of speed (even if you are not planning on having any GPS enable system)
Press Submit
You now be redirect to a login URL, this URL send you into a login loop. To get around this error for now to just go straight back to the URL of https://incontrol2.peplink.com and login again from there.
Click on your your new Organisation, you new organisation will open in a new tab.
##Creating a New Group within Organisation
You need to do this before you can proceed any further when creating a new organisation
- Enter the a group name for where your first devices may be, if you will only have one group, then enter something descriptive like “Company Name Office”
- Verify the Address using the same principles as when you created the organisation
- Set the time zone for where the groups equipment will primarily with operate, alternative if you are going to have within the group equipment running across multiple time zones, choose the time zone of either the main/HQ office location or “(UTC+0.00) Coordinated Universal Time”. Note: If your required time zone is not there, choose the time zone that matches most closely the time zone required without the use of Day Light Saving.
When done select the “Create Group” button.
You will now be direct to the “Add Devices Into Groups” for the group "“Company Name Office” that you just made.
##Add Devices Into Groups
As this guide is on how to set up InControl2 without any devices, select the “Cancel” button taking you to the next screen, your new group dashboard.
##Securing you InControl2 Access
This has been covered in a previous article by @alan, rather than reproduce it, have a look it the section “Securing InControl Access”. If you elect to skip this step, do come back and do it before going live with any devices. For this example we have skipped this step.
https://forum.peplink.com/t/quick-and-easy-ways-to-secure-your-router/8062?u=mldowling
##Setting up initial Organisational Settings
In addition to setting up your security above, here is some information on what else we recommend setting up within the “Organizational Settings”
- Select the organisational level on InControl2
- hover your mouse over “Organization Setting” so the drop down menu appears, then click “Organization Setting” within the Drop down link
- quickly verify all of the security setting are correct as per the previously mentioned guide
Note: Keep the image file sizes here small, say under 150KB or you will get an error uploading when you save the changes
- Change the Logo to the required company logo, PNG files with clear background work best
- Change the Favicon to the required company icon, PNG files with clear background work best
- Select the “Save Changes”
As web browsers tend to cache the Favicon and other images, to test the save has worked, hold down your “Shift” Key and either click on the Refresh next the the address bar or do a combined keystroke of Shift-F5
You should now see the company Logo & Favicon updated
Navigate back to the organisation Overview, remember the Favicon will be cached from before you changed it so just refresh the page as before to update this
##Setting devices group settings
Navigate into the group you have already created earlier
Hover your mouse over “Settings” and choose “Group Settings”
To setup your email notifications, @Alan has posted and extensive article here called “Receiving Email Notifications from InControl”
https://forum.peplink.com/t/receiving-email-notifications-from-incontrol/8152?u=mldowling
In this example we have opted not to set up email notifications.
###Time Zone
If your group is going to be in a different time zone than your main organisation, this is where you can set it up.
We highly recommend enabling “Devices follow this time zone setting” especially if you are going to be running any Wi-Fi or Captive Portals.
###Device Web Admin Authentication
For this demo we have skipped over this step, though we highly recommend going through the previously mentioned “Securing InControl Access” before going live with any devices.
###Captive Portal general setting
For the purpose of this demo, these steps have been skip
- WeChat Settings for Captive Portal
- SMS Settings for Captive Portal
Keep and eye out for a future article on these, the WeChat & SMS Settings can take a bit to get operational.
##incontrol Appliance / Private Cloud Settings
“InControl Appliance / Private Cloud Settings” are for advanced custom set up, look out for a future article on this from Peplink’s Team
- Remember to press “Save Changes” once done.
- Now navigate back to the group Dashboard
##Hidden Menus
As mentioned before, Peplink have hidden several of the menus until you add in equipment that is capable of the menu’s features. Pre-configuring of these can help tremendously with doing large project roll outs.
This section covers how to access them. This is for advanced integrators and support engineers, it is not meant for beginners. Peplink at its discretion may remove this ability in the future.
There are several menus normally visible until you have devices capable of those features within a group, yet with a bit of effort these hidden menus still accessible;
Normally in a Group you will only see the menus and sub menus of;
- Reports
. Event Log - Clients
- Settings
. Device Management
. Device IP Settings
. Bulk Configurator
. Firmware Policy
. Device Schedule
. Add Devices
. Group Settings
Yet though direct URL addressing the full menu is available to access of:
- Reports
. Device Reports
. Wi-Fi Reports
. Captive Portal Reports
. Event Log - PepVPN / SpeedFusion
. Live Status - Tabular View
. Live Status - Map and Logical View
. Configuration - Wi-Fi AP
. Group-wide SSID Settings
. Group-wide Radio Settings - Network Settings
. VLAN Networks
. Captive Portals - Clients
- Settings
. Device Management
. Device IP Settings
. Bulk Configurator
. Firmware Policy
. Device Schedule
. Add Devices
. Group Settings
##Getting ready to access the hidden menus
Every InControl2 group has a unique URL, though it can be interpreted with a little bit of effort.
Your URL will look form your Dashboard something like “planet.ic.peplink.com/o/ABCDef/n/1/overview”. All you need to do is edit the “overview” at the end of the URL to access the required menu.
###Reports
With Reports, this is more useful for where you have removed devices from an existing organisations group.
Note that if you delete the organisations group you will lose access to the archived data.
In a new organisation they reports will all be empty.
Use the bold text below in place of “overview” to access the hidden menus of:
- Device Reports router_reports
- Wi-Fi Reports wifi_ap_reports
- Captive Portal Reports captive_portal_reports
##pepvpn / SpeedFusion
Although you can access the menus for PepVPN / SpeedFusion, there is almost nothing you can configure with the devices in the system, though we have the menu options here for reference.
Use the bold text below in place of “overview” to access the hidden menus of:
- Live Status - Tabular View pepvpn_status
- Live Status - Map and Logical View pepvpn_graph_status
- Configuration pepvpn_management
##wi-fi AP
This has to be one of the most useful to have preliminary access to when pre-building a Wi-Fi solution as you can configure almost everything to do with the Wi-Fi.
Use the bold text below in place of “overview” to access the hidden menus of:
- Group-wide SSID Settings config_ssids
- Group-wide Radio Settings radio_config
###Network Settings
Again very useful for pre-building your VLANs and Captive Portal (access Splash Pages) from:
Use the bold text below in place of “overview” to access the hidden menus of:
. VLAN Networks vlan_config
. Captive Portals captive_portals
##Where to find more information
Articles and Guides on how use each of the menus can be found throughout the forum by using the search at the top right of the screen.
Happy to Help,
Marcus 