2GT-RichandClaude Opus 5
e10f7ba568
Documentation only — no functional change.
The README was carrying two jobs for two different readers. Its Reference section was
the single largest block at 154 lines, and nobody deciding whether to try the project
reads an InfluxDB environment variable table — while the people who need it were
scrolling past the pitch to reach it.
Split along that seam: anything you would read before installing stays in the README,
anything you would read after installing moves to docs/.
README.md 430 lines sell, prove, install, feature overview
docs/change-guard.md 193 safety system, settings, guard states
docs/architecture.md 116 data stores, polling model, module layout
docs/capsman.md 84 role model, radio matching, current limits
docs/alerting.md 81 rules, channels, webhooks, maintenance windows
docs/api.md 77 scoped tokens, preflight, scripting
docs/configuration.md 76 environment, secrets, rotation, TLS
docs/sso-oidc.md 71 identity provider setup and behaviour
docs/README.md 20 index
In-repo rather than a documentation site, deliberately. A change to Change Guard's
semantics can edit its documentation in the same commit as the code — which, given how
often that behaviour has been refined recently, is the property that actually matters.
A static site generator can point at docs/ later without moving a file.
The Change Guard pitch stays on the front page: the problem framing, the verified
recovery timeline and the quoted prediction warning are what make someone care, and a
reference page is the wrong home for them.
Three sections are new rather than relocated, written because the split exposed the gaps:
- architecture.md did not exist. It now records why there are three data stores, the
polling cadences, and which modules are pure functions over a snapshot and why.
- Scoped API tokens shipped without usage documentation. api.md shows preflighting a
change from a script and reading the guard block afterwards.
- change-guard.md records why ip-on-bridge-port is informational rather than critical
on RouterOS 7 — reasoning that previously existed only in a commit message.
Every internal anchor and cross-file link verified to resolve, including anchors into
other documents. No content dropped, checked by keyword comparison against the previous
single file.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
3.8 KiB
CAPsMAN
An access point provisioned by CAPsMAN holds none of its own wireless configuration — the controller owns it. Reading the AP directly returns blank SSID, security and band, which makes a perfectly healthy access point look broken.
The platform models the controller relationship instead.
Device roles
Every device is classified each poll from /interface/wifi/capsman and
/interface/wifi/cap:
| Role | Meaning |
|---|---|
standalone |
Has radios, manages them itself |
cap |
Radios are provisioned by a controller |
controller |
Runs CAPsMAN; has no radios of its own |
controller_cap |
Runs CAPsMAN and its own radios under it — a supported MikroTik arrangement |
none |
No wireless hardware |
The role is detected, not inferred from device_type. That matters because a dedicated
controller is usually classified as a router, and device_type is a label a human typed
rather than a fact about the hardware. The Radios tab and the wireless section follow the
detected role.
How CAPs are matched to devices
The controller enumerates every radio it manages — local and remote — through
/interface/wifi/radio, each with a radio-mac. Those MACs are matched against every
interface MAC in the fleet.
MAC rather than IP address, deliberately: a MAC is hardware identity and unique fleet-wide, whereas an address is only unique within a broadcast domain. An installation with several segments reusing the same addressing would otherwise attribute a radio to the wrong device entirely.
Two refinements come from real deployments:
- A controller mirrors each CAP's interfaces locally, so a CAP's radio MAC genuinely
appears on two devices. A radio the controller reports as
local: falselives on a CAP by definition, so the controller is never a valid answer for it. - A radio MAC often differs from the device's interface MAC in the final octet, so lookup falls back to a five-octet prefix while keeping the OUI exact.
A CAP that is not in the fleet is surfaced as unmanaged rather than hidden — that is usually the reason an access point appears to be missing.
What you get
The CAPsMAN panel on the Wireless page lists every controller with the access points it provisions, one row per radio: the AP it lives on (linked), interface name, provisioned SSID, operating channel, connected clients, and state.
Two details are read from the controller rather than the CAP, because the CAP does not know them:
- SSID — held on the controller's mirror of the interface.
- Client counts — a CAP's own registration table is empty when traffic is processed
centrally. Counts come from the registration table with each client attributed to its
radio by following
master-interface, since clients register on the virtual AP carrying the SSID rather than on the physical radio.
Write protection
A provisioned radio is owned by the controller, so a local write to it is either rejected outright or silently replaced at the next provision — while the API reports success.
Five paths refuse or skip provisioned radios, naming the controller in the error: bulk SSID deployment, interface create, interface edit, interface delete, and guest network setup.
Current limits
Provisioning, configuration edits and interface enable/disable are deliberately not exposed. A CAPsMAN configuration applies to every access point bound to it simultaneously — the fleet-wide version of the failure Change Guard exists to prevent. Those operations are held back until they carry the same prediction-and-revert protection that per-device changes do.
Legacy /caps-man — the pre-RouterOS 7 controller — is a separate API tree and is not
covered. The RouterOS 7 wifi stack is supported.