Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ubiquiti all the things: How I fixed my dodgy Wi-Fi

troyhunt.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 277 posts

Re: Ubiquiti all the things: How I fixed my dodgy Wi-Fi

#61

Post by gh02t »

sandGorgon wrote: post #32

what is a good way to connect router or access points OVER WIFI. i dont have wired backhaul in my office and it would be fairly cumbersome to build one. are there APs with two radios each - one for backhaul and one for service?

Lots of routers support this, even single-radio consumer stuff with DD-WRT but it dedicates half your bandwidth to uplink and half to clients. Others you can use e.g. the 5ghz radio for uplink and 2.4ghz for clients.

I presume there is some enterprise gear that does it too. I know there are consumer products like Eero or Ubiquiti's AmpliFi line have mesh networked repeaters. Especially the AmpliFi might be good enough for you, depending on how demanding your usage is.

Re: Ubiquiti all the things: How I fixed my dodgy Wi-Fi

#62

Post by esaym »

baobrien wrote: post #47
esaym wrote: post #39

I've thought about Ubiquiti in the past, but they are not "stand alone" units right? Meaning I am forced into allowing the units to phone home so I can manage them through Ubiquiti's cloud service? (something I don't want or need for a small home set up) Last year I bought my wife and I our first set of "smart" phones. Yes I'm serious, I've been in IT all my life but never felt I had a need for anything other than a…

The UniFi stuff isn't stand alone, but it doesn't need to 'phone home' to Ubiquiti. There's a little management server with a web config interface you need to set up to run everything. It runs on your local network and doesn't call Ubiquiti or open up anything without you setting that up. They do have what they call the 'cloud key' that runs an instance of the Unifi management server. That thing does phone home, IIRC…

I see. And is this "management server" the "java" thing everyone keeps referring to? (and complaining about)

Re: Ubiquiti all the things: How I fixed my dodgy Wi-Fi

#63

Post by mrb »

uean wrote: post #48

I've taken over deployments of UniFi gear and do not have nice things to say about them. We typically deal in the Aerohive and Meraki world and I find the Ubiquiti zero-handoff to be terrible (I see real-world handoff times of up to 8 seconds in some cases) auto channel selection inneffective, band-steering implementation completely broken, and then just some basic lack of features of things that, to be fair, I would…

Sounds like you have been dealing with older gear. Zero handoff is a deprecated feature which is no longer supported in current products. Nowadays Ubiquiti simply recommends roaming:

https://help.ubnt.com/hc/en-us/articles/205144590-UniFi-What...

Re: Ubiquiti all the things: How I fixed my dodgy Wi-Fi

#64

Post by gh02t »

mmastrac wrote: post #3

I have Unifi AC APs in my house. Expensive, but 100% worth it. They've struck a really great balance between configurability+power/ease-of-use. I compare it to my Mikrotik switch that while being able to do pretty much anything I could want to do, has such a steep learning curve that I ended up just using it as a slightly fancy home firewall/switch. I'm considering pulling the trigger on the Ubiquiti switches and ano…

Yeah I have a Mikrotik manages switch and Ubiquiti router. The Mikrotik UI feels like I can do absolutely crazy stuff but I can't figure out how. Ubiquiti can do the same stuff but is a little more reserved in how many knobs and options it shows you. Both are great hardware, but different bends - Mikrotik is "here is everything you could ever com figure out what you want" while Ubiquiti is "with great power comes responsibility."

I like both a lot, but I think Ubiquiti has the edge if I had to choose.

Re: Ubiquiti all the things: How I fixed my dodgy Wi-Fi

#65

Post by ComputerGuru »

uean wrote: post #48

I've taken over deployments of UniFi gear and do not have nice things to say about them. We typically deal in the Aerohive and Meraki world and I find the Ubiquiti zero-handoff to be terrible (I see real-world handoff times of up to 8 seconds in some cases) auto channel selection inneffective, band-steering implementation completely broken, and then just some basic lack of features of things that, to be fair, I would…

What would you recommend for a similar configuration as the OP's?

I've ended up using pfSense combined with enterprise switches and ultra-dumb access points with 802.11Q support to simply - as transparently as possible - bring the wireless devices into the network administration fold.

I've taken to using the higher end TP-Link AC routers as my APs, but have played with Ubiquiti instead as well.

Re: Ubiquiti all the things: How I fixed my dodgy Wi-Fi

#66

Post by alfredxing »

I have a Ubiquiti setup for WiFi at home (though not as complex as in the blog post - just an EdgeRouter X and UniFi AC Lite). It has never gone down once, and performance is the same as on day 1:

  ubnt@ubnt:~$ uptime
   06:16:26 up 140 days, 13:15,  1 user,  load average: 1.08, 1.03, 1.05

Re: Ubiquiti all the things: How I fixed my dodgy Wi-Fi

#67

Post by baobrien »

Cieplak wrote: post #22

Does anyone know how to tell if a wifi device uses beam-forming versus omnidirectional microwave emissions? I imagine that beam-forming devices expose people to less microwave radiation (2.4 and 5 GHz). Somewhat alarmist but an interesting perspective: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=F0NEaPTu9oI

That talk is entirely baseless fear mongering. Electromagnetic Hypersensitivity is entirely unsupported by the science.

Re: Ubiquiti all the things: How I fixed my dodgy Wi-Fi

#68

Post by zackelan »

Godel_unicode wrote: post #34
thaumaturgy wrote: post #19

I'm happy to see Ubiquiti getting some exposure here and on Reddit and other places recently (and also a bit worried that this means they're about to start releasing garbage and/or get bought by Cisco, since that seems to be a phenomenon that happens). We've been installing and using their gear in deployments all over the place for over 5 years now and it always just works. I think we've had to replace two faulty uni…

Icymi, there are several dockerfiles you can use to install unifi on a Linux box. From earlier today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13158468

Yes, but the problem with Dockerizing the Ubiquiti controllers (or at least the Unifi one - I haven't attempted with the others) is that the Java app requires MongoDB, and chooses to spin it up as a child process and treat it as an embedded database. Unless you're careful with volume mounting, restarting the Docker container will lose all your wireless connection info, forcing you to reset the AP to defaults or restore the Mongo instance from a backup.

Re: Ubiquiti all the things: How I fixed my dodgy Wi-Fi

#69

Post by Johnny555 »

csmajorfive wrote: post #51

For those of you well versed in Ubiquiti, what's the recommended approach to connecting two switches that don't have wired backhaul between them? Right now I am using two consumer ASUS routers and one is in "wireless bridge" mode. I don't think the Ubiquiti access points support that model. So what's recommended? The distance between is fairly small but with many walls in between.

Depends how much bandwidth you need and what the distance is. A pair of Unifi Nanostations (available in 2.4Ghz, 5Ghz, 900Mhz models), will give you 100Mbit, a pair of Nanobeams will give you up to 450Mbit.

I use a single Nanostation 5Ghz out on the front porch to bridge back to my Unifi Wifi node

Re: Ubiquiti all the things: How I fixed my dodgy Wi-Fi

#70

Post by rblatz »

freen wrote: post #24

I'll repeat what I have said on previous threads: if you have a low RF noise environment, ubiquiti is ideal. Anything else, you need to buy a real system with three radios per node and a smart controller that adjusts channel/power on the fly.

I live in an apartment with probably 15 wifi networks visible at any time. Plus my xm radio has recently started cutting out in the parking lot of my apartment, it's either the microwave radio tower or noise coming from the high voltage lines/electrical substation behind my complex. I "upgraded" last Christmas to a Linksys AC router, it was awful had to reboot it daily to get wifi to work, got annoyed and picked up a router and put the Linksys in wireless only mode. Still didn't fix it. So I bought a UniFi AC Pro and it has been rock solid. I can also pick up my wifi network from an incredible distance from my apartment now. So it may not be as good as some of the enterprise stuff, but it's also reasonably priced. I'm extremely pleased with it.
Post reply on HN