My last post was about creating a Guest SSID in Mist Dashboard with some BYOD self register and self sponsor features. I mentioned few requirements in there; one of them was to enable and disable the SSID. Let me elaborate a bit more on that. I can log into my laptop, Mist Dashboard and disable the SSID; or enable it when the guests arrive (Scheduling is great, but not something that works for me in this case). I even created a script that allowed me to accomplish this without logging into the Mist Dashboard.

If I am in a different room, I didn’t want to have to get up, log into my laptop, log into the Mist Dashboard, disable the SSID and save. That is too much work.

Solution:

I have been tinkering with iOS shortcuts and thought; wouldn’t it be great if I can get Siri to do this for me? I found the following link very useful. I am no coder so after few failures I got it working.

Now all I had to do was ask Siri, “Hey Siri, Disable Guest” or “Hey Siri, Enable Guest”. Video below shows me doing just that.

Looking at the Audit Log in the Mist Dashboard I can see exactly what happened:

It may be a simple task for lots of people out there who are proficient in coding; however, an exciting step for me considering how new I am to this. More importantly it shows the power of Mist AI and Automation in general. I can see so many potential uses for this based on my experience as a network and wireless engineer. Certain tasks can be accomplished while sitting on a beach or visiting your relatives. No need to pull out your laptop, fire up your VPN and run through multiple steps just to click a button. Thank for reading.