Collectors that know when to stop, and a Backups page you can work in
A collector with nothing to report now stops holding a channel open, and says so on the card
instead of counting down to a fault it does not have. Concurrent open channels, not data volume, are
what strain small hardware, so a router with no WireGuard peers and no NetWatch hosts stops paying for
both. It wakes on its own: the moment you open the page, when the router reconnects, or on a slow
re-probe that backs off to ten minutes.
Chasing that turned up three real bugs on the smallest hardware, all the same shape. An empty result
looked identical to a dead one. On a streaming channel RouterOS answers an empty table with !empty,
which MikroDash deliberately swallows because on a stream it means "nothing yet" rather than "nothing".
The cost was that a cAP AX with connection tracking off restarted its Connections stream every 20
seconds, forever, and reported the stream degraded while doing it.
Added
- Collector dormancy. A collector whose data is empty, or whose menu the router does not have,
suspends itself and the card says "nothing to report" rather than going stale. Unsupported and
merely-empty are treated differently: a command error is durable and sleeps for ten times as long as
an empty table, which is transient. Nothing is hidden and nothing is dimmed, because an empty card
that already reads "No devices" needs no second opinion. - Every collector can be switched off per router. The Router Settings toggle grid had drifted to
11 toggles against 21 disableable collectors, so Topology, VLANs, PPP, Bridges, CAPsMAN, DNS,
Packages, WAN, Queues and Router Users could only be turned off by hand-editingrouters.json. The
grid is generated from the collector registry now, so it cannot drift again. - Backup time. Choose the hour a scheduled backup runs, in your display timezone, instead of
whenever the interval happens to elapse. Defaults to 08:00. Clearing the field is a real choice and
means "any time", which keeps the old interval behaviour. - Delete restore points. A selection column on the Backups history, with Delete acting on one or
many. Delete removes the files and the row; the Audit page keeps the record of both the backup and
its deletion. - The backup ID is shown in its own column, so the id an audit entry names is readable rather
than something to dig out of the page.
Fixed
- Connections restarted its stream forever on a router with an empty connection table. The
watchdog could not tell a quiet stream from a dead one, so an access point with tracking off took a
restart every 20 seconds. It now asks the router once, on a one-shot request where an empty answer
is unambiguous, before tearing anything down. - Top Talkers went stale on a router with no Kid Control devices. It only produced a payload when
the device list changed, so a table that was empty and stayed empty produced nothing at all. It also
had no heartbeat while advertising a poll interval, which held its card to a deadline nothing was
going to meet. - A "this router has no Kid Control" verdict never stuck. Three separate paths cleared it, so the
probe reopened on every browser reconnect and every idle wake-up. Its retry backoff was also a flat
60 seconds that never grew, despite claiming to be exponential. - The Audit page Target column showed the word "router" instead of the router's name, and the
CSV/PDF export carried a bare uuid in its router column. Both name the device now. A router deleted
since the event keeps the generic marker in the table and the id in the export, where a dangling
reference still has to be followable. - An empty payload left the previous router's rows on screen. Top Talkers and the LAN overview
both treated "the router reports nothing" as "nothing changed", so after a router switch the card
kept showing the other device's data, invisible to the stale timer.
Changed
- The Wireless page is now Wireless Clients, and no longer shares both its name and its icon with
the Wireless section holding it. The section keeps the wifi symbol; the page takes the signal bars,
which is what it actually lists. Only labels changed: every key, permission and saved setting is
untouched. - Restore moved to the Backups header, beside Delete and Back Up Now, and is coloured apart from
both. It acts on the selection and needs exactly one restore point, since "which of these three?"
has no answer. - Dragging a firewall rule leaves its original position open, tinted, so you can put it back if
you change your mind. Dropping onto that gap returns the rule to where it started.
Upgrading
Nothing to do. Dormancy is automatic and reversible; a collector wakes as soon as it has data.
Backup time is the one behaviour change worth knowing: a router whose backup schedule predates this
release has no time recorded, so it moves to 08:00 rather than staying wherever its interval had
drifted to. Clear the field on the Backups page to keep the old any-time behaviour.