I have two sites, both with Balance Ones. Each site has two AP One AC Minis, and one or two AP One Flex’s. All APs are setup to offer the same SSIDs with as identical configuration as possible.
I have them being managed by the Balance Ones, but there are a bunch of settings missing from the Balance One AP management that are present on the individual AP One web interface. Things like WDS, boost power, and others.
I am curious the best way to manage things:
Manage each AP One standalone, set settings consistently manually across devices.
Use Balance Ones to manage some aspects or at least gather stats - not sure this would work, since it seems that Balance One overwrites locally set settings
Use InControl2 - not sure if it won’t do the same as above? Are all of the advanced settings available there?
Looking for best practices in where to manage things centrally…
Hello,
You can also configure other settings by clicking the (?) on most of setting pages on the AP Controller to enable advanced settings.
There are more features on the B305 and above that configurable in the AP controller.
With your current setup any settings that are setup manually will be (as you stated) over written by the AP Controller.
You may need to setup each AP manually if the settings in the Balance One are not achieving what your trying to accomplish.
AP Controller is more feature rich then IC2 at this moment as we are still working on adding more configurable options to IC2.
Thank you! I was not aware of the question mark to enable additional settings. Just tried that on one and a few of the additional ones I was looking for are there.
In terms of WDS, is that in the AP Controller or IC anywhere, or is that a local AP only thing?
Hello,
That is a Local configuration only.
Thanks.
Is there a way to locally configure APs, but have them report stats back to the Balance One or IC? I am fine with managing the settings manually for the APs, but I’d like to have stats somewhere centrally…
You can add them to IC2 to keep statistics/event logs/remote management done there. You will just need to ensure that wi-fi management is turned off (un-selected).
Go into the group>Wi-Fi AP: Uncheck wi-fi management.
Seems that Balance does not actually control APs dynamically… At least, when using Remote AP option, only manual changes in Profile settings or Toolbox triggerable function Auto Power Adj / Dynamic Channel Assignment will really act on APs… But firstly, this triggering causes clients to handover to neighbour APs and then reboot, and this may rather start problems to clients who using service. Secondly, there is really annoying to sit in controller and trigger these functions manually, is there any fully automatic operation of controller somewhere under hidden functions? Where one can check what the current system performance in terms of error rate in AP/per client is?
Hi mobileuser,
Your comment really point out our AP Controller insufficiency at this moment and we are going to address the dynamic RF management and client statistics reporting in future firmware release (after 6.2.1).
In current firmware, AP power can be adjusted in background automatically if the power setting is “Dynamic:Auto”. However, we are not providing channel adjustment in background because this may cause client disconnection (No re-activation on AP if channel update is triggered through the Toolbox).
We will consider to add “Dynamic:Auto” and “Dynamic:Manual” like options in channel setting and improve the RF management algorithm in the future.
Thanks,
Lewis