prepare_aruba_ap_switchport: Support special userport naming for WG APs with room downlink
Problem
Since we deploy Aruba-APs in the hallways of dorms with multiple rooms (WGs), but provide a downlink for a single room via the AP, the current approach is to use the room's uplink cable as uplink for the AP and provide the downlink for the room via the E1-Port of the AP.
The current naming scheme creates a second userport in the AdminDB and names the one for the socket (the “downlink userport”) like previously, but with socket number Aruba-AP
and the second userport (for the WLAN-AP uplink, the “uplink userport”) WLAN-AP [ROOM]
. However, this naming scheme is not correct in this case:
- While logically the user is connected to the WLAN-AP's E1-Port, the physical connection is still to the socket in the room with its respective socket number.
- The Aruba-AP is not connected to a socket in a room, but to a socket in the dorm's hallway. The userport for the AP, however, is still named after the room and not the dorm as a whole.
Proposal
Thus, I propose a second naming scheme, which shall be made available as a command-line option (since it does not apply to all houses):
- The downlink userport shall retain its socket number (i.e. it is not renamed to
Aruba-AP
). This ensures that admins don't get confused when a user actually specifies the socket number (which is also helpful in avoiding confusion when doing debugging with a user). - The uplink userport shall be renamed to some name unique to the dorm instead of the room. Usually, some part of the room number indicates the dorm, so we need a way to obtain the dorm number from the room number (e.g. a regex or a shell pipe).
Example
In House L, there is a dorm with rooms 09-00-21, 09-00-22 and 09-00-23. The dorm number seems to be indicated by everything but the last character of the room number (i.e. 09-00-2). The userport whose cable shall be used as WLAN-AP uplink is 09-00-22, socket 5.
The userport name before the installation of the WLAN-AP is: 09-00-22, Dose 5
.
After installation, the current naming creates:
- downlink userport:
09-00-22, Dose Aruba-AP
- uplink userport:
WLAN-AP 09-00-22, Dose 4
The proposed change shall result in the following naming:
- downlink userport:
09-00-22, Dose 4
- uplink userport:
WLAN-AP 09-00-2, Dose (none)
(the socket name is(none)
since we don't really have a specified socket name if there is no actual network socket)