You act like it’s no big deal, but I have hundreds MikroTik devices to which I run bandwidth tests as part of regular troubleshooting. These are all well out of customer reach. (Many times customers have a non-MikroTik router, and I’m testing to the radio or a PowerBox Pro on their roof.)
- These changes require physical access
- Truck rolls are expensive (customers are not touching the equipment)
- Application of the change is service disrupting, stuff that we would normally do overnight
- We don’t climb roofs and towers at night for safety reasons, forcing the work to be done during the day
- Daytime maintenance is best done on weekends, to be the least disruptive
You are (essentially) saying that, in order to keep using bandwidth-test as a troubleshooting tool, we have to coordinate a time to visit each house and business, climb to their outdoor-mounted gear, have someone type in a device-mode permission via the CLI, push the reset button in time, disrupting their service, then pack it up and go to the next one. And after we’ve spent all week doing that, spend the weekends doing the same process with the rest of the gear at our tower sites, taking dozens (if not hundreds) of customers down in the process.
I’m a one-man WISP. To hit all customer-inaccessible CPE devices would take me two to three weeks (10-15 8-hour business days), and 5 weekends (at best). This is assuming I have no other work to do, and wouldn’t give me any time to install new customers or upgrade existing ones.
Let’s say I don’t need it on customer equipment, or I don’t upgrade any outdoor gear past 7.16. I still have 20+ sites I have to go to in order to touch the routers/switches, plus dozens of devices in two data centers.
Why not just force bandwidth-test to use authentication, and not work at all unless it has some kind of strong (i.e. long) password?
(Photos attached of a CCR2116 installed in a cabinet that is only accessible 6 months out of the year at a site that overlooks three valleys. We tried to get up there this past Monday, but the truck got stuck.)
