This is an old revision of the document!
3G / Mobile support for APdesk and MESHdesk
Introduction
Today, all of the commercial cloud based controllers we know about require that the hardware be connected to an Ethernet network running a DHCP server.
MESHdesk and APdesk was also like that until recently.
While one of the developers were waiting for a DSL Internet connection, the only other Internet connection available was through the mobile network using a 3G dongle.
Since neither MESHdesk nor APdesk are driven by hardware sales but rather to provide creative solutions, this then offered just such an opportunity.
We can now with pride say we also support mobile Internet connections as an alternative to Ethernet based Internet connections.
—————-
A Catch-22
Having a controller somewhere on the Internet where a device will fetch its settings from will require the device to have an Internet connection to start with.
If you use a mobile connection there will be the requirement to preset the device with some very basic configuration in order for the device to get Internet connectivity.
This is where we use the MESHdesk Node Config Utility.
The utility now include a 3G Option tab to pre-configure the device for Internet connectivity.
This is usually a once off setup and will be left unchanged until you maybe one day decide to disable it or to use another mobile provider which will then need their unique settings.
The first item to select on the 3G Option tab is an Action
Do Not Change will leave the device unchanged and without adding or removing any existing mobile specific settings. This is the default and set during start-up.
Enable will enable all the fields which you can then populate.
Disable will disable an existing mobile configuration (provided there is one)
Now that the device is pre-configured it can use the mobile connection to get Internet access and fetch the rest of its settings from the RADIUSdesk server.