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router pre-installation best practices

azurtem

Casual Member
Hi
I'm looking for any advice and recommendations on how best to tackle the preparation/pre-installation i.e. cloning, of a high volume of routers before shipment: system update and client configuration setup
Are there tools, best practices or are we simply talking about elbow grease and consistentcy ?
Regards
 
Hi
I'm looking for any advice and recommendations on how best to tackle the preparation/pre-installation i.e. cloning, of a high volume of routers before shipment: system update and client configuration setup
Are there tools, best practices or are we simply talking about elbow grease and consistentcy ?
Regards
Depends on the hardware and use-case. ONIE and some orchestration such as Ansible for the data center.

Likely to be completely different for ISP CPE and consumer routers.
 
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Although not specifically pre-installation, for CPEs, TR-069 is obviously something that should be known about. Draytek references are good to crib ideas: https://www.draytek.co.uk/support/guides/kb-acs2-routercfg

I recommend looking into Teltonika RMS for other ideas: https://wiki.teltonika-networks.com/view/RMS

Here is a nice reference for many remote management options: https://wiki.teltonika-networks.com/view/RUTX50_Remote_Monitoring_&_Administration

Ansible is best when the router is very server-like. Many consumer-grade routers are embedded devices which could be less server-like.

It's important for enterprise to realise CPEs should be treated as untrusted devices as physical access is equivalent to complete control/root-equivalent.

Best practice to use official vendor or community collections. Random search hit this arbitrary example: https://galaxy.ansible.com/community/routeros
 
Last edited:
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I would be dealing with Mikrotik devices therefore ansible seems to be the likely option
Thanks for your detailed response Mikeliuk; much appreciated
 
I would be dealing with Mikrotik devices therefore ansible seems to be the likely option
Thanks for your detailed response Mikeliuk; much appreciated
Random web search also found this:
 
For customer devices I'd be looking at an auto provisioning system rather than trying to build routers before they're sent out. You want something that people can factory default and automatically recover.
 
There's a lot of variables here but I would be looking at a hardware manufacturer who supports installing a new permanent default config, coupled with remote configuration by TR-069. While we originally used Mikrotik for this, we've recently moved to TP-Link's ISP line of routers. We upload a default config to them that has generic RADIUS details, then it talks back to our billing platform (Splynx) via TR-069 to pull down the assigned client's configuration.
 
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