[RIPE Atlas Ambassadors] News and Happy Holidays!

Dear Friends,
Our whole objective is to make it easy for the hosts to deploy the devices
and ensure uptime. So some hosts don't bother too much and just abandon the
devices.
DHCP is OK where we deploy in homes. The downside is that there will be lot
of downtime. At night and sometimes during the day. 
The right locations would be offices where they would be powered on 24x7.
However most of them do not have DHCP or have some authentication mechanism
before they allow users to connect.
In such scenarios the device should have a default IP which is available
when we do a hard reset and then it is very easy to connect it to internet
using their policy.
Also most colleges do not support DHCP and they employ MAC authentication
and give out static IPs to users. 
Our net objective is to ensure almost all Probes are Live all the time and
they are not abandoned. Having an option of Default IP /Username/Password
through RESET  button would help things definitely.

Regards
Durga Prasad
+919849111010


-----Original Message-----
From: Geert Jan de Groot [mailto:GeertJan.deGroot at xs4all.nl] 
Sent: 27 December 2015 01:54
To: Dmitry Kohmanyuk
Cc: DurgaPrasad - DatasoftComnet; <ripe-atlas-ambassadors at ripe.net>
Subject: Re: [RIPE Atlas Ambassadors] News and Happy Holidays!

Hi all,

Apologies for hijacking the list like this.

On Sat, 26 Dec 2015 21:33:42 +0200 Dmitry Kohmanyuk wrote:
>> A major problem in setting up these probes is that we cannot 
>> configure it directly with a static IP address. So it is getting 
>> limited to places where they have a DHCP server. I have many 
>> customers without a DHCP server due to some reasons of their own.

> Well, if probe had remote configuration option to be controlled from 
> RIPE atlas panel it would be nice. But you still need to bootstrap it.

You can configure a probe to use static IP. I take it that most know this,
but in case you have not found out:

Log in on the ATLAS portal, select your probe, select the 'network' tab, and
find that there are 'edit' buttons. Make your change there, when the probe
connects to the network (for which it will need a DHCP-enabled network,
alas), it will download the static-IP config and use it from then onwards. 

Two problems:
1. You need a DHCP-enabled network to bootstrap this; 2. You will need to
change the probe BEFORE you change the network,
   so that the probe will get the new config (using the old network)
   before connectivity through the old network goes away.
   (using a button for "forget the net config and switch back to DHCP"
   may be a good idea)

While I've done static config in the past for my probe, I find that just
configuring DHCP to put the probe where I want it it to be a lot more
convinient. The thing really is set up to "just connect to a network and
forget".

But, if you need static config to make the probe hookup fly, then it is can
be done. Just don't expect it to be painless.

Geert Jan