InControl2 Group Wide SSID settings based on Tags

Hello there,

i have a feature request, or maybe someone has a possible work arround for the following.
When a company uses arround 55 vehicles with Peplink BR1’s / and transit models for mobile connectivity, giving them the ability to use the Group Wide Wi-Fi settings via InControl2 is great, but in every vehicle is a mobile work place. Which has the same printer in all of the 55 vehicles.
When more then 2 vehicles are next to eachother (which happens alot) the employee doesn’t know to wich vehicles wifi it is actually connected, as all vehicles are configured with the same SSID.
Printing a document would work, but they will never know which vehicle they are connected to, so which printer in those vehicles is printing the actual document :slight_smile:

We can work arround this, to use the Token based authentication centrally managed by incontrol so the employee can login to the 55 different SSID’s if we configure every vehicle with a different SSID.
But configuring this in incontrol is pretty time consuming as we need to create the Tags for every vehicle, and manually also the SSID’s.
Would it be an option to name the SSID of the vehicle the same as the tag that we apply to the vehicle / peplink? Or is there a simpler way of generating all these different SSID names?

Thank you very much for your reply!

Kind Regards,

Yannick Poel

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IN the group wide SSID Settings page you can use “####” which will be replaced with the last 4 characters of devices’ serial number.
So:
image

Would give each vehicle a unique wifi SSID.

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Hi Martin,

Thanks for your reply, didn’t know about the #### feature although the problem with this is, that the employee doesn’t know what the serial number of any given vehicles peplink would be.
It would refer it as vehicle 1 to 55 not vehicle one uses a certain peplink unit.

Yannick

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True, but it could be labelled.

That needs clarification. Are you saying they would prefer the SSID to be wifi1, wifi2, wifi3 based on the vehicle number - how do they know the vehicle number? The BR1s / Transits are fixed in the vehicle - a permanent install yes?

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Yes correct, the vehicles would be numbered with stickers on the back or something like that.
an employee would then refer to the sticker and the correct wi-fi name.
Although the pepwave will indeed be permenantly installed, yes, but for the non IT employee the could refer to the sticker number matching the SSID

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OK. So feels like something based on the device name in IC2 would work perhaps?

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I understand that changing the SSID on all of your equipment to uniquely identify it would be time consuming.
Perhaps you could try to restrict the mac addresses for the devices that you know will need to connect to that unit in the vehicle?
image

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Hi Jonathan,

Thanks for the tip, but this would be just as time consuming as well.
I talked to the end costomer for now they will do it manually regarding there SSID’s but it could be possible next year another 50 vans will be made for this project and managin SSID’s will again become a time consuming task.

The deny list will make it less flexibele i think for employees to switch / connect to different vehicles.
But again thanks for the input!

Yannick

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At least that way you would only have to touch each pepwave, instead of pepwaves and client devices.
You should have a list of all the current connected clients macs.
You can still setup a second AP SSID for things that are movable such as a persons mobile device and leave the printer and things that are in the truck hard-coded to the same ssid?

Another thought,can you turn down the power gain so it’s less likely that devices outside of the vehicle would connect, or do you need wifi outside of the vehicle as well?

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Hello Jonathan (@Frontier_Netherlands),
We are with @MartinLangmaid in that the best place we can think of to make this work with the minimal amount of administration will be through InControl2, that includes with various VLANs.

We already use the tags within InControl2 to very successfully manage SSIDs though out the groups within InControl2.

Would you consider using the InControl2 API to custom develop a suitable solution to fill in the gaps?

Happy to Help,
Marcus :slight_smile:

Hi Marcus,

They have enough dev’s inhouse to maybe pull this off. But how do you think this would work?
What kind of way would be possible in using the API that could fix this “problem”?

Yannick