RAS for 3rd party vendors

[markl]

Hi. I have tried the RAS and with your help seems to be working now. In order for me to access the router remotely, I need to login to my Outages portal, and click the RAS profile that I setup.

My question is, how can our 3rd party vendors who has their switches/machines located on our premises/network access remotely using RAS without giving them access to my Outages portal?

[SBK]

@markl

Hi,

Mainly you can create as many profiles as you need, eventually naming them with the vendor's names, the only important thing is to associate each profile to the public IP from which the vendor will connect.

Once you have them all set you can just share the URL (the light blue link that you can see both in the RAS configuration and in the extended dashboard)

[OutagesIO_Support]

Also, it might be prudent to put together a little agreement before giving your vendors any access.

The agreement should specify that this is not to be used for heavy traffic, just reaching configuration screens etc.

We aren't metering at the moment but if heavy traffic and very high data use starts happening, the ras function could get disabled.

We'll have to look at the code. I don't think the idea of someone sharing their profiles ever came up as it was never intended to be used in this way.

[markl]

@OutagesIO_Support Hi,

Now I am testing it with the vendor's equipment. I created a new profile but it has been in starting configuration mode for more than an hour... any idea here?

[OutagesIO_Support]

Hi,

I don't see the agent connected, it says it's Inactive in its dashboard.

You should see a notice in the RAS config that says the following.

"RAS cannot be used because the agent is not active."

If the agent becomes Inactive or Disconnected, RAS is disabled since there is no reliable or usable connection at that time.

Can you confirm that the profile works once the agent is back online.

I suspect that the configuration has not been able to complete because the agents has been experiencing some disconnections. I don't know for sure yet, just guessing since there has to be a solid connection for RAS to work right and to complete it's configuration process otherwise it can hang.

However, we'll have to check the code because if this is the case, it should not hang, it should re-try so let me dig into this.

[markl]

@OutagesIO_Support Hi. Sorry for that, we just had an outage on our area. Now it is back online, and the agent is now active. Still waiting for the RAS to be up.

[OutagesIO_Support]

No problem, it's actually helped us to find another little bug.
It seems that if a profile or RAS is enabled during an Internet problem or if the Internet connection is not highly stable, the setup gets confused. It gets only parts of the back and forth communications needed to continue the RAS connection but then it doesn't know how to restart.

We'll look at this shortly and see how we can improve it. To get it working again, you only need to disconnect RAS then re-connect it but if you don't mind, I'd like a dev to take a look at this before you do, just in case there's something useful.

[markl]

@OutagesIO_Support Sure, just let me know. Another thing that you may want to know, I have RESET the hardware agent, and changed its location. After resetting, I noticed that all the RAS profiles were deleted so I created a new one. And this new profile is the one that is still in configuring status.

[OutagesIO_Support]

Wait now, what do you mean by 'reset'?
Do you mean using the dashboard or that you reset the hardware agent?

[SBK]

@markl

Ok so i see that you reset the whole data for this agent, something like 4 hours ago, not sure why since you can play with all the profiles directly from the RAS configuration page but maybe we need to improve documentation so that is more clear.

I keep seeing the agent going inactive so RAS cannot be triggered correctly until the agent won´t be stable again

[markl]

@SBK Hi yes you are correct. We're still having intermittent connection so I'll probably check it again on Monday. Thanks...

[OutagesIO_Support]

Not sure you know this but we gave you another free month since your last one was mostly outages :).

[markl]

@OutagesIO_Support Hi, yes I was testing it. Will probably create a post for my testing.