Will Smith
Those who are familiar with Aruba know that Remote Access Points (RAPs) have been a popular solution that allows users to work from home. Aruba Central is a natural fit for highly distributed remote deployments and offers many advantages being cloud native. One of the big advantages is full support for automation workflows. As the demand for work from home continues to grow, this places increase pressure on the support teams for these large remote networks. Using the automation capabilities built into Central (webhooks/REST APIs), I’ve developed a service to help automate the provisioning process.
The Geo-IP Auto Provisioning Service (GAPS) will auto assign any new AP to a group in Central based on the physical location of the device.
#How it works:
- New AP is plugged in at a user home and automatically connects to Aruba Central.
- Central via webhook posts a message to GAPS which then does a REST API call to Central for AP details.
- The details are parsed for the public IP. GAPS makes an API call to a public GEO IP service which return the physical location of the installed AP.
- The location data parsed for the two letter state code. This is checked against a local dictionary that maps the state to a group in Central (IE East-Group / West-Group).
- GAPS then sends the group info to Central and provisions the AP into the proper group.
To deploy this service for your own network, please follow the install instructions on Github: