With “ready built” wireless cpe (such as Smartbridges or Osbridge) you can remotely log in to the device (ie over the wireless link) and then do a scan (site survey) to see what other access points it can see. With the Mikrotik this is not possible as the scan is a permanent scan (until you manually stop it) and if you try it whilst logged in over the wireless link it just kicks you off.
It would be great if there was some way to do such remote scans as with our own network we often need to assess if a customer is better off feeding off a different access point.
We are deploying hundreds…maybe over 1000 MT133C customer radios and a remote site survey tool is very much needed. All of our preceding CPE’s (Deliberant, Smartbridges, Proxim) all had this capability. Deliberant also gave us the capability to connect to a secondary backup AP if the primary failed.
Don’t know how long it has been available, but I found out recently (by accident I add!!) that it IS possible to do a remote scan!
If you open up a telnet session (only done this via winbox from another Mikrotik) using the IP address of the remote unit (does not seem to work with the mac address) and then go to Interface : Wireless and then Print (to “see” the wireless interface(s)) and then type Scan 0 (or Scan 1 etc). The terminal session goes quite for a little while (ie you might think it is not doing anything!) and then all of a sudden it reports back what it has found. It seems to do multiple scans and then report back all of the results.
Be nice if it could be done when connected to the remote unit directly via winbox rather than via a terminal session, but it is still a great relief to have the facilitiy available!
What I’m guessing is happening is that when you start the scan, it runs for a few seconds, but your telnet session has been dropped, which causes the scan to stop. This probably happens quick enough to keep the telnet session from timing out, so then the result is sent to you after the connection is re-established.
