I’ve been happy enough with my mid-range mPower (EU edition) that I bought an mPower PRO (again, EU edition). I finally got around to unpacking it and setting it up.
mPower mini, mPower and mPower PRO are Ubiquiti Networks’ IP power outlet product. They run Linux on them. There’s web UI, and it’s also easy to SSH into the device out of the box (username is ubnt and password is ubnt). This makes the device easy to script for: all power use statistics and remote control are exposed as files in /proc/power. An app for Android exists as well.
I purchased the mPower PRO simply because I needed a few more plugs to control. Difference between mPower and mPower PRO is that the latter has six instead of three plugs, and it has both WiFi and an ethernet port (all smaller models have just WiFi).
Since my previous post) was originally written in August 2014, I discovered that a newer firmware has a nicer web UI, and changing the default username and password is not really a problem anymore either. So I ended up flashing the device, then factory-resetting it. Given how nicer web UI is important to me, this means this will be the first step with my today’s setup of mPower’s “bigger brother”.
Unboxing and connecting
The box contains the device, a wall-mount and a small manual. I’m interested in just the device, of course.
First difference is that mPower PRO will not bring up a wireless network you use to set it up. Instead, you must connect it via the ethernet port. This is fine; I’m happy that I lucked out and had an extra ethernet cable lying around.
mPower PRO picked up an IP address over DHCP immediately. To find out what to punch into the browser, I just looked at my router’s DHCP leases and saw what device is outside the statically-assigned range (I hand out IP addresses based on known devices’ MAC addresses). I then added the new MAC address to the list of known ones, and assigned a new static IP to it. (By the time I am writing these lines, the original lease expired and the device already has the new IP address.)
Upgrading firmware
This mPower PRO shipped with v1.2.6 firmware, which means I have to use the manual upgrade method. So I’ve downloaded the 2.11.1 firmware and:
scp firmware.bin ubnt@198.51.100.84:/tmp/fwupdate.bin # RFC-5737 example IP range \o/ ssh ubnt@198.51.100.84 -t /sbin/syswrapper.sh upgrade2
Password is, as previously mentioned, ubnt. This will take a while. Don’t unplug the device while it’s being flashed. After a few minutes you’ll probably get something like Write failed: Broken pipe. This is fine.
In future, you can use web UI to flash an upgraded firmware.
Logging in and changing password
If your device is at 198.51.100.84, then just visit http://198.51.100.84/ and log in with username ubnt and password ubnt. You probably don’t want others to be able to log in with the same credentials, so change them as soon as feasible.
On the System tab, next to the field ‘Administrator Username’ and its value ubnt, there should be a small icon of a key. Click on it. Then, change the administrator username, enter the old password ubnt, then enter the new password twice. Then click the ‘Change’ button which is above the ‘Management’ section and below the ‘NTP’ section. You’ll get asked whether to apply the changes. Do apply them.
Hooray! mPower PRO is sufficiently ready for basic use. At some point I’ll go ahead and assign port names which doesn’t seem to be doable through web UI.
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via blog.vucica.net