Site-level configuration inheritance explained Follow
How does site-level configuration inheritance work?
When site-level configuration inheritance is enabled for a device, your device's final configuration will be created by merging two different sets of configurations:
- The common site level configuration for that product type, and
- The device's individual configuration, which includes settings not configurable at the site level, such as advanced radio settings, features unique to a single product, and more importantly, any device-level configuration overrides.
There are configurable common settings at the site level available for each product type:
- Wi-Fi devices (this includes all standard Wi-Fi products like Spark, SunSpot, Spark Wave 2, etc),
- MetroLinq,
- MeshLinq,
- Switches,
- etc*.
At the time of device registration, you will choose whether or not you want your device to inherit from the site level config, but this behavior can be changed at any time by selecting the appropriate menu option from the device's main menu.
Example
Here's a screenshot of the common site-level configuration settings for the WIFi Access type devices (1) in our Irvine office. You can see below that the 5 Ghz and 2.4 GHz radios each have one SSID attached to them (2):
Any other SSIDs you add here will be inherited by all Wi-Fi Access devices in the site that have site-level config inheritance enabled.
If you navigate to the config page of one of these device's, you'll see:
- (1) The "ATCW" SSID was inherited from the site-level config, as indicated by the green site-level origin indicator.
- (2) THE "ATCW 5 GHz" SSID was initially inherited from the site-level config, but has since been modified, therefore creating an override. Any future changes to this SSID at the site level will not be reflected in the device-level config.
- (3) The "Guest Wifi" SSID was never inherited from the site-level config, and is unique to this device's configuration, as indicated by the purple device-level origin indicator.
Overrides can always be reversed by pressing the revert button near the setting that's been changed:
or:
You can revert all device level configuration overrides by pressing the main "Use Site Settings" button at the top of the config page.
Entity Overrides
You may notice that changing a single setting for an SSID causes all other settings for that SSID record to also be overridden. We refer to this type of config setting as an "entity".
Other settings, such as LANs seen above, can have different values within the main value changed without creating an override for the entire LAN.
There are currently three types of config entity types:
- SSID records
- Local login records
- VLAN records
Confused about which inheritance policy to choose?
1. Inherit site-level settings
Select this inheritance behavior if you want to manage the devices in your site like a single unit with a common configuration.
This is the most popular way to configure Wi-Fi access devices as well as MetroLinq Omnis. You might choose this for a hotel, business, or other similar application where enterprise Wi-Fi is deployed.
Even though devices will inherit most of their settings from the site-level, you can always override any site-level settings at the device-level by making changes on the device-level configuration pages.
2. Don't inherit site-level settings
Select this inheritance behavior if you don't want your device to inherit any settings from the site level.
You might choose this if your device will be used for infrastructure, backhaul, or will be configured independently from the other devices in your site. This is the typical choice for MetroLinq PtP links.
What if I don't see an option to change my device's inheritance behavior?
If you don't see an site inheritance registration option at device registration, this means we do not yet have site-level inheritance support for your product type.
History
Prior to February 2018, site-level configuration settings were only available for Wi-Fi access types of Devices.
The inheritance behavior was also referred to as "Configuration policy", and there were two options, "Enterprise" or "Individually configured". Devices that were "Individually configured" still inherited a subset of site-level system and service settings, such as local logins and timezone and such. This was changed after January 2018.
* = Common site level settings are still in development for certain product types, so check back soon if you don't see an option for your product type!
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