Can OpenWISP Manage Your Routers in Many Towns?

Managing routers across several towns can become tedious very quickly. Suppose you need to change a setting on a router two hours away. You might have to catch a bus and lose half a day. Add software updates, password changes, and routers that quietly drop offline, and a lot of your time disappears.

OpenWISP is a free tool that can make this work much easier. It lets you manage several routers from a single place and make changes remotely. There is one catch, however: it only works with routers running a specific system. Since many ISPs in Kenya use something else, OpenWISP may not be the right fit for everyone.

The challenges of managing remote routers

Distance makes the usual router problems harder to deal with. Settings can gradually drift out of sync. You might fix one router at 2 a.m. and forget about the others. A few months later, they are all different, and you might not remember why.

Passwords can get reused or written down. If a router goes offline, you may not learn about it until a customer calls. Updates can be risky too. If an update breaks a router in another town, you are facing a long trip to sort it out. And if only one person knows how everything is set up, the rest of the team may be stuck when that person isn't around.

Think of it like running a school with 10 classes in 10 different villages. Without a register or a way to reach the teachers, you might not know there is a problem until a parent complains. With a way to check on each class, you can see who is there, send the same instructions to everyone, and find out that morning if a teacher is missing. Managing remote routers gives you that kind of visibility and control.

What OpenWISP does

OpenWISP is a collection of tools.

The first is the controller. It stores your router settings in one place, so you can create a set of settings and send it to several routers at once. New routers can register themselves too. A small program on the router contacts your server, identifies itself, and downloads the right settings. That means you can plug in a router at a shop in a remote town and have it configure itself.

The controller can also set up a private tunnel between your server and a router. This can make it easier to reach routers that sit behind a mobile operator's network.

The second tool monitors your devices. It shows whether they are online and how quickly they respond. You can also check hardware load, network traffic, the number of connected Wi-Fi users, and signal strength on mobile links. If something goes wrong, OpenWISP can send you a notification, so you may hear about the issue before your customers do.

The third tool manages software updates. You can upload a new version, test it on one router, and then roll it out to other devices in batches. If the connection drops during an update, the tool can try again. That could save you from travelling between towns to update each router by hand.

OpenWISP also has a few other tools. One uses FreeRADIUS to manage logins and can help you set up Wi-Fi login pages. Another maps your network, while an address book helps you keep track of IP addresses and control who can see information about each site.

OpenWISP is open source, so there is no license fee. But you will still need to look after it yourself. That means managing the server, installing updates, and keeping backups.

Will it work for a Kenyan ISP?

OpenWISP calls itself a management tool for OpenWrt. 

Its website says it "primarily targets OpenWrt," but it is built to handle other systems too. OpenWrt is a free operating system you can install on your router in place of the manufacturer's software. Most ISPs use MikroTik routers, which run MikroTik's own system, RouterOS.

The honest answer is that it depends on what you have got. If most of your equipment runs OpenWrt (TP-Link or Ubiquiti radios with OpenWrt installed, or cheap routers like the Xiaomi Mi Router 4C), it can help you organize your towns. 

If your towns run MikroTik RouterOS (many owners prefer it for the hotspot and speed limiting features), it probably isn't the right tool for you. There are other tools that do the same job.

There are plenty of free and cheap options for RouterOS. You can manage your routers from anywhere using Winbox or WebFig. You can set up a script to back up each router's settings every night. Netwatch can keep an eye on your devices and alert you if one goes offline. 

MikroTik has its own tool called The Dude, which draws a map and monitors status. There are bigger monitoring systems you can use for free, like Zabbix and LibreNMS, but they take some work to set up. Creating a private tunnel (WireGuard) between your routers and a server gives you access to all your towns. None of these will let you update 50 routers with one click, but with a few good habits you will have most of what you need as a small ISP.

Ask yourself four questions:

What system do your routers run? 

How many sites or towns are you managing, and are they increasing? 

Who will manage and update your server, and what happens if they leave? 

Does it fit with your billing system? 

The login module can cause some confusion, as it can overlap with your billing, and having two systems deciding who gets internet can cause confusion.

If you want to try it out, start with something small

Rent a cheap server or dust off an old computer and install OpenWISP. Connect two or three OpenWrt routers you can easily get to, and you won’t mind replacing them if something goes wrong. Set up a configuration and push it to your test routers. See what happens when a new router comes online, how it shows up in monitoring, and whether you get an alert when you unplug one. Test updates on a spare device, not a router people rely on. And make sure you know how to undo the changes.

Keep your server secure just like you would a router. Keep it up to date, only let certain people log in, and use strong passwords and keys. Back it up somewhere else. If it crashes, you won't have visibility of everything, so work out how you will connect to your routers if that happens. Write down how you would recreate it.

A tool is only valuable when it fits the task at hand. 

OpenWISP performs well with some routers and poorly with others, so review your options first and then decide. Make a list, choose two routers to test, and see how they perform. 

The full rollout can wait until you know it works.