SSID Broadcast Scheduler, Reboot Peplink/Pepwave Devices Via Utility App, Up time Notifications

1st Request: For Surf Soho, Balance One, Any other Pepwave AP device, to have the ability to be able to have a scheduler to turn off SSID Broadcast and turn back on in time frames.

2nd Request: The ability to reboot Any Balance or Pepwave Device Via Peplink Utility App just like the Infradog App for rebooting Servers. Also the ability to have a scheduler to reboot devices. Example: I tell the Peplink/Pepwave device to reboot at 10 PM on August 15th, 2015.

3rd Request: Also to send notifications to the Utility App when the device has reached a certain Up time in days according to what I requested. Example: I input my Balance One to send me a notification after 150 days of Up time.

This would be amazing.

Hi, Thanks for your feature requests. Some questions to help understand your requests:

  1. SSID broadcast scheduler - What’s the purpose of this? To limit SSID visibility when you don’t want it to be easily discoverable perhaps?
  2. Manual and Scheduled reboot - Why would you want or need to do this?
  3. Uptime reached notification - why do you need to know this?
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1st Reason: Yes to hide SSID at certian times of the day specifically at night. We have a couple of really good hacking guys and we have found in a few instances of people try and or successfully cracking WiFi passwords for a few people and they all happened at night.

2nd Reason: We use Balance Routers Primarily for hosted VoiP Phones and you know how hardware works, sometimes just a good reboot clears out issues at least from year of experience in my specific field. “When In Doubt Reboot” And lets say I am on the road and have a customer that is having a lot of choppiness on the calls and I have already had one of my techs call the ISP and run our diagnostic tests on my end and the ISP had to send a refresh signal to their modem/Dmarc or what have you. And at that point I need to reboot because not every tech has access to our routers for security purposes. This means I need to reboot and I need to reboot now. This scenario has happened plenty of times and resolves the issue.

3rd Reason: It would be nice to see a notification for me personally at the 150 up time so I can schedule a reboot and be proactive. Now I’m not talking about customer with just computers running over them, I am talking about Peplinks with just VoIP phones running over it.

Also, I am not in charge of 1-10 for example Peplink devices. Myself and 2 other guys but mostly myself and 1 other tech proactively monitor and maintain around 250 networks ranging from 5-300 devices and about 90% of these networks are routing with Peplink Balance Devices or Pepwave devices. So things happen every single day and I need to react and have solutions like an hour ago. So all these little requests I ask for are from real world in the field scenarios that I see everyday that would absolutely make local networks better and manageability better. To some people it may sound petty but I am working on a very spread out scale in man y different states and these Peplinks are my life line. I wish I was managing 1 large network but that’s just not the position I am in right now. I hope this makes sense and again these are just suggestions that a guy that services hundreds of these devices would utilize every single day.

We appreciate your support and feedback TJ!!

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Thanks for getting back to me. I completely get your requirements - they don’t sound petty at all.

The reason I asked about why you needed to reboot the Peplink devices was because I wanted to make sure it wasn’t because of any potential issue with the reliability of our gear.

From your answers I see its about bouncing our devices to then make the VoIP handsets and other connected devices recycle their sessions/connectivity to fix issues there - which makes sense, especially when you are remote from the install.

I know that we are looking at remote reboot options - I’m sure that’s being considered for InControl 2, and I would expect that functionality to be rolled over into a smartphone app sooner rather than later.

I expect that we could ask the InControl team to consider adding a 150 day uptime notification for you too since they are already monitoring device availability as part of InControl’s reporting function.

I question the value of hiding the SSID alone to reduce the opportunity for hacking though - would a scheduled AP availability plan be better when the AP functionality gets completely turned off overnight and then back on in the morning? I might have done a little wardriving in my youth, and if I did, I might comment that all the best targets where the ones with hidden SSIDs… if you know what I mean.

We’ll definitely review these requests - thanks for taking the time to post them.

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Thanks guys it’s much appreciated.

And yes, it would be a complete turn off of WiFi that I am looking for, not hiding SSID.

Hi, I’m curious to know if a ‘Remote Reboot’ option has been released. I livein Philadelphia but have a Router in CA with several devices connected to it but occasionally I will loose a connection to one of the devices. I would like to be able to remotely access the router access page to perform a ‘Reset’ to help rule the possibility that the router just needs to be reset out before moving forward with other troubleshooting and also because the router is above ceiling tiles.

I saw a reply to this thread indicating that this may be a feature that was being looked into. Is their any update?

You can find the option to trigger remote reboots (along with ping, traceroute, etc) under the ‘Device Tools’ menu option at the device level.

It’s also possible to schedule device restarts. This can be found under the ‘Device System Management’ menu option at the network level.

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Thank you this was very helpful. Unfortunately, it is not allowing me to add some of my devices saying they are already on another group. I wonder if they were previously added to a group by the technician that installed them. How would I check this?

Please contact your purchase point for further assistance. They should able to help you to add the devices.

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