Meraki MX 'Hard Reboot' And Cellular Connectivity

[ZackM]

Hi, apologies if this has already been addressed elsewhere but I struggled to find anything relevant; I help manage a number of Meraki estates, some of them with several thousand devices within a single organisation and currently one of the most time-consuming tasks my colleagues and I have is where an MX device, using a cellular failover, loses service on said failover and we need to have the device physically rebooted in order to restore service.

What it appears is that the reboot feature for the MX's is a soft reboot of somekind, as the cellular modem doesn't look to get restarted as part of the reboot cycle when issued on the Meraki dashboard. This also looks to be the case when we run the command via API: /devices/{serial}/reboot

When we hard reboot an MX device, the full power-cycle invariably includes the cellular modem too, however this is time consuming in that if we see cellular services drop, we then need to call the site and request that the reboot said device. Times that by the sheer size of the estates managed and this almost becomes a full-time job.

My question I guess is whether there's anyway within the confines of Meraki, that a reboot of an inbuilt cellular modem is possible or if there's a way to run a more comprehensive reboot, rather than what I assume to be a stop/start service on running processes?

[Inderdeep]

@ZackM : Did you run the below 

dashboard = meraki.DashboardAPI(API_KEY)

serial = 'XXXX'

response = dashboard.devices.rebootDevice(

    serial

)

print(response)

[mlefebvre]

That command is the same as the one they said they have already run, the python library is just a wrapper that makes the API commands easier to use.

def rebootDevice(self, serial: str):
"""
**Reboot a device**
https://developer.cisco.com/meraki/api-v1/#!reboot-device

- serial (string): (required)
"""

metadata = {
'tags': ['devices', 'liveTools'],
'operation': 'rebootDevice'
}
resource = f'/devices/{serial}/reboot'

return self._session.post(metadata, resource)

[PhilipDAth]

Not that I'm aware of.

[Ian-V]

Hi Zack,

Thanks for your question.  There's no functionality in place to reboot the integrated cellular interface on the MX without power cycling the device.

It'd be helpful to know why you and your colleagues are needing to reboot the cellular interface in the first place, as it shouldn't be coming offline while the MX is powered on.  Have you and your team identified the root cause behind the loss of service?  Any additional information would be great.

Thanks

Ian

[PhilipDAth]

You can't get a root cause usually because their are no tools to collect enough information.

I expect common issues would be firmware bugs in the cellular modern causing it to crash, hung out stick receivers, and general hardware issues.

[ReubenFarrelly]

In my case I need to have the Cellular module properly reset because the carrier has made some changes to the service and this requires the Cellular modem be restarted to pick these changes up (new session to the carrier network is required).  A warm boot does not suffice as the Cellular card does not actually disconnect from the network when the warm reboot is done.
You could reasonably say that this does not need to be the default reboot option, but it should be there for situations like this when it is needed.  I can still get to the router via the other link so I can issue commands to it.  The ability to either restart just the cellular model OR do a full power restart of the chassis would be sufficient in my case.