Meraki’s goal has always been to change the economics of Internet access. By enabling companies and organizations to build large-scale networks quickly and cheaply, we figured we could get more people online, more often, and in more places. The response over the past year has been amazing: our customers have built thousands of networks covering villages in Chile and apartment complexes in California. We’ve also gotten a lot of excellent feedback. People email, call us, and drop by the office every day. In response, we’ve been busy building new features. We’re going to use this blog to keep everyone abreast of our latest product developments.
And now for the good stuff! There’s been a lot of product activity over the last couple of months that we’d like to share. Below are some of the most significant improvements. Email us and let us know what you think.
User List
A number of people told us that they need to understand what a given user is doing, not just a given device. So we added a user list, where you can see a user’s activity across all of her devices. This works whether your network uses Meraki’s native user auth, RADIUS, or our prepaid card system. To use it, just login to Dashboard and go to Monitor-Users.
Enhanced Failover
Internet connections sometimes go down. Previously, this caused problems because repeaters would continue to send traffic to the failed gateway, even if another gateway was available. The mesh is now smart enough to recognize when a gateway’s internet connection has failed, and automatically recovers once the connection comes back up.
Network Isolation
Multiple Meraki networks in the same area no longer route traffic between each other. This is an important security enhancement that will become more important as the number of Meraki networks continues to grow.
Routing over Ethernet
Some people have wondered what the second Ethernet port on the Meraki outdoor might be used for. The second port, combined with routing over Ethernet, lets you combine two Meraki radios together. Here’s one way this could work. Let’s say you have a portion of your mesh that is far away from its gateway. Put a directional antenna on one Meraki Outdoor to get a strong signal to your gateway. Then, attach a second Meraki Outdoor using a regular Ethernet cable. Finally, put an omni-directional antenna on the second outdoor so you can build out the mesh.
Run Dark
Sometimes you just don’t want to draw attention to your Meraki repeater, especially at night. You can now turn off the LEDs on your Meraki network.
– Posted by Hans Robertson