Building onboarding checklist

This is the portal side of onboarding a building. It ends when a technician can be dispatched into the building with a job sheet; the fibre, the racking and the first patch happen on site and are recorded as they happen.

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0. Access

• Every operator who onboards buildings needs an admin login in the operator portal. Check Administration → Users and that the person has signed in once.
• Technicians get their own technician sign-in from Installs & Dispatch → Technicians → Set up sign-in (see CPE provisioning).

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1. The building record

Site Manager → New site → Building. Fill in what the platform derives names and identifiers from: Check the Units tab afterwards: the register must show the real unit numbers (per-floor layout when floors differ — use Change layout → Per level).

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Bulk internet

The building’s page has a Bulk internet row (Off, or On with the number of attached products); Change opens the dialog. The flag says the rent includes the internet. Under it you attach wholesale products, each with the wholesale rate and the bulk rate (the difference is the provider’s margin); only products marked Can be included in rent are offered. Once the flag is on, residents see only bulk plans, and every other building offers only paid plans. The flag never changes a live line: lines already on a bulk plan are listed in the dialog and stay as they are. Attaching a product does not create coverage; a provider still needs its contract or pick on the building.

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Operator discounts

The building’s page has an Operator discounts row beside Bulk internet. It lists the kurnl discounts that run on this building, with their dates. Add or change them under Administration → Operator discounts; the building row is the shortcut. A building that offers bulk internet gets no discount code, since the code never applies to bulk plans. See Operator discounts.

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2. Rooms

Documentation → Rooms. One MER exists by default; add a SER per secondary telecom room (one per floor in a riser building). Put the room’s real designation and backboard into the note (for example Communications Room B105, backboard TBB-M). Rooms become NetBox locations; the ROOM segment of every unit identifier resolves through the switch that stands in the room.

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3. Switch

Equipment → Stock → Assign to building (room: MER). The assign mints the canonical name (…|MER|SW01), takes the next free OAM address and mirrors the device into NetBox. Then on the switch:

• Credential set — pick the shared set for the vendor; never type a login into the switch row.
• Switch label SW01 (SW02 …) — the short name the panels, job sheets and the port map use.
• Room — make sure the switch stands in the MER (or the SER it is in).
• Switch layout (the switch’s page) — an access switch by default (subscriber ports plus uplinks); set aggregation only for a switch that carries no subscriber. Check the port roles: the port towards the building uplink — or towards the previous switch when buildings are chained — is Uplink; ports that stay dark are Unused. The catalog sets sensible defaults per model (FS S5860: subscriber ports 1–20, uplinks on its four 25G ports, which run at 10G for standard SFP+ optics; the 40G ports stay unused). A switch without any uplink gets no golden configuration until one is set here. Taking a port off Subscriber asks first — the next golden configuration turns it into a trunk or shuts it down — and is refused while a subscription is live on it. Units are only ever mapped to subscriber ports: the unit port pickers, the patch panel and automatic port assignment never offer an uplink, management or unused port, nor any port of an aggregation switch, and the platform refuses such a mapping if one is attempted.

Golden configuration — this is what the field engineer loads on the switch, at the bench or on site:

1. Equipment → switch → Golden config. Pick the target iBOS line that matches show version on the unit (7.7 default; 7.5 only as a bridge for older firmware — it has no per-port MAC limit, so the switch is upgraded to 7.7 and the default configuration rolled out again afterwards).
2. Download. The file contains the switch login (username and secret from the credential set) — handle it like a password, do not post it in chat.
3. On the switch: enable → configure terminal → paste → end → write. Verify hostname, OAM address and default route against what the portal shows for the switch. If they differ, fix the record in the portal and download again — never edit the file.
4. Once the switch answers on the OAM network the portal picks it up (health, port map); a Golden config drift finding names anything that differs.

FS.com switches take the same configuration without the console, from the switch’s page (open it by its name in the building’s Equipment tab; the row’s Config opens the same dialog, Device record the credentials, model and management address in Equipment):

1. Golden config in the page header → Preview on switch lists what the switch does not show yet.
2. Apply to switch writes it from the portal. The switch is told to reload within ten minutes first, so a lost session brings it back to its saved configuration; the configuration is saved only when the switch shows every line.
3. The dialog follows the apply stage by stage — connecting, waiting for the clock, safety reload armed (with its time on the switch clock), sending the lines (counted), verifying, saving, cancelling the reload — with the elapsed time. It takes a minute or two. Closing the dialog does not stop it; opening it again shows where it is. One apply runs per switch at a time: a second one, or a preview, waits until it is done.
4. If the switch refuses a line, the dialog names the line and the stage it stopped at, and the time the switch goes back to its saved configuration; nothing is written to it until then.

After changing a port role or the switch role on the switch’s page, the Switch layout panel says the change is not on the switch yet; its Preview on switch opens the dialog and reads the switch. The notice goes once an apply succeeds or a preview finds nothing missing. Flash the approved firmware first: the Golden config dialog names the approved image for the switch’s model with its download, or says that none is approved yet (Administration › Firmware & Advisories → Switch firmware). Loop protection on subscriber ports. The golden configuration of both vendors protects every subscriber port against what a resident can do at the wall port: a loop (a switch cabled back into itself, or two wall ports cabled together) shuts the port, which comes back by itself after five minutes; broadcast and multicast floods are capped; a foreign switch that sends spanning-tree frames is refused. Uplinks carry none of this. A port the switch has shut shows Shut by the switch with the reason in the port map and on the switch page. For a switch that is already in service — customers on it — use Write loop protection on the switch page: it adds only these lines to the subscriber ports and saves, without resetting a live line.

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4. Rack and placement

Documentation → Rack → New rack (default: MER Rack 1, 15U — the standard wall rack in the bill of materials; set the real height if the building differs). The rack stands in the MER room. Then Place device: The elevation is what the technician sees on the job sheet (Show rack view).

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5. Patch panel — when the splice plan is known

The panel is the splice panel of the riser, not a mirror of the switch: in a building with more units than switch ports it has 48, 96 or 144 ports (Estoya’s quote names a 144-fibre rack panel) and every unit is spliced onto a rear port once, while only the active units are patched to a switch port on the front. Its port count is a fact from the splice design — create the panel when that design exists (Documentation → Patch plan → New panel, name, port count, rack units), never as a guess. Seed panels (one 1:1 panel per switch) is only right where the panel really is a 1:1 breakout of the switch. The panel is mirrored into NetBox with front and rear ports; place it in the rack (step 4). Later — the patch plan itself. Rear port ↔ unit (the splice) and front port ↔ switch port (the patch) are recorded when they exist: in a first-line rollout the splicer and the patcher fill the sheet once; in a third-line building the technician’s Patched on the job sheet writes each unit’s patch as it is made. Do not pre-fill a plan you have not seen.

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6. Circuits

Circuits → New: the building’s uplink (carrier, hand-off interface, speed) and the connection to the NOC, both planned; set them live at turn-up. The health topology and the technician’s site card read them.

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7. Minting and provisioning — later

Minting a unit’s location needs its effective switch port. In a third-line building that port exists once the unit is patched, so Mint now runs per unit after the first visit (Units → Path to service → mint pending). A first-line rollout mints the whole register after the patch sheet is filled. Provisioning itself is automatic from the CPE’s first contact — see CPE provisioning.

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8. Pre-orders

A building can take orders before it is live. On Site detail → Overview, tick Open for pre-orders. Opening and closing both ask for a confirmation. While the building is open, a Pre-orders badge shows on the Sites list, and the site page shows how many orders are waiting. Precondition. The building needs an occupancy permit date. Nothing else is required, and first-line buildings are allowed. What residents see. The building shows as available for pre-order on the storefront and in the customer portal. A resident who picks a future move-in date checks out as usual: the card is saved and nothing is charged. The order waits. The move-in pass. An hourly pass (from 01:00 building-local time) picks up waiting orders. On the move-in day, or on the go-live day when the building goes live later, it activates the line, invoices it (prorated from that day) and charges the saved card. A building that is not live never activates a waiting order; it activates on the go-live day. Tickets open in the kurnl ops group: Activate now. On the customer’s page, a waiting row shows Activate now. It starts the order without waiting for the move-in pass. It is operator-only: the customer cannot trigger early activation, and moving the move-in date in the portal is not available yet.

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At a glance