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

troyhunt.com

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

#91

Post by PietdeVries »

OriginalPenguin wrote: post #49
finnn wrote: post #7

Since we're all saying nice things about Ubiquiti, I feel obliged to point out that they are actively violating the GPL: http://libertybsd.net/ubiquiti/

Wow. And here I was just thinking with this week's Netgear security vulnerability, maybe it was time to switch to Ubiquiti. Guess I'll just wait for the Netgear patch and save my money.

I have two of their products, and must say: when they work, they work awesome! Range is great, monitoring is great - just compliments.

But a firmware upgrade on their access point caused quite a lot of trouble. And with only one access point I seemed to be the lucky one, others had more work fixing it. Some got bricked when trying to revert to the old firmware. Support forum should provide background information if required.

Bottom line: the sales-flyer always looks great but the moment you actually touch the device you start to notice some issues you wished someone told you beforehand...

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

#92

Post by csmajorfive »

eplanit wrote: post #89
csmajorfive wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've had bad experiences with other mesh products (Eero, namely) but perhaps.

Oh -- I'm curious. I just bought a set of Eeros. So far they've made a big improvement (old house, thick walls, etc.). What problems did you have with them?

I found them to be slower than my ASUS AC87 in good coverage areas. Improving areas with spotty coverage was nice but outweighed by the speed hit.

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

#93

Post by fencepost »

colanderman wrote: post #54

For the rest of us with budgets of less than a month's rent, I'd recommend Mikrotik. Just as reliable as an Ubiquiti (as in, never needs a reboot), yet is still a single box you can set in the corner and forget about if you wish. Or set up a mesh of their $20 units to blanket your three-story house if you're so lucky. (Nothing against Ubiquiti which I'm sure is great, but I've been a very happy Mikrotik user for year…

The problem with the Mikrotik stuff (speaking as one who uses it) is a level of user friendliness that makes Cisco IOS command line interfaces seem like a good idea.

It's possible to do some amazing things. It's also possible to screw up trying to do amazing things (use safe mode for automatic rollback in case your changes lock you out).

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

#94

Post by csmajorfive »

Johnny555 wrote: post #69
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

I need as much bandwidth as I can get over a pretty short distance -- let's say 30 feet. I'm bridging two closets at opposite ends of a hallway. One closet has the WAN connection. The other closet has a bunch of hard wire gear (NAS, home theater, etc).

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

#95

Post by lobster_johnson »

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…

The Java stuff caused problems at our office because the installer (on OS X) didn't even run. Not on any computer. It got stuck trying to discover the device, when in fact it was the Java app that didn't work properly. We had start that web server thing from the shell and then point a browser to it. Even then we (one of whom is a former Cisco engineer) had to struggle several hours just getting it to start a working wifi network.

The box is Apple-pretty, but it's probably the least smooth network device I've had the misfortune to set up, and it's scared me off Ubiquity a bit. It's not just us, either. Forums found plenty of people with similar issues, but no solutions.

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

#96

Post by pokemongoaway »

zackelan wrote: post #68
Godel_unicode wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 resto…

Why can't we have docker store it on a mounted volume that it attaches at startup?

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

#97

Post by reitanqild »

shmerl wrote: post #83
reitanqild wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the point where you realise the sw + fw + hw package you bought doesn't do what it is supposed to I'd say you should strongly consider returning it; if for nothing else then to teach them a lesson :-/

> you should strongly consider returning it I specifically bought hardware with open WiFi driver and well compatible with open OSes, to be able to replace the stock installation. Why should I return it now?

Ok, I'm talking about the general "you", the public, not "shmerl".

You might be able to do that. Troy Hunt doesn't want to. I don't want to. If I want to be able to inspect my network gear I guess I should go with Microtik or something but to each their own.

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

#98

Post by mahyarm »

I don't understand why he needed the expensive PoE switches although. He could of used cat 6, consumer non-PoE switches & standard $15 PoE injectors close to the switches themselves. He wouldn't get the fancy interface for the switches, but he would of had similar wireless and wifi performance.

Or does Ubiquity require you to use their switches for anything to work properly?

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

#99

Post by lobster_johnson »

colanderman wrote: post #54

For the rest of us with budgets of less than a month's rent, I'd recommend Mikrotik. Just as reliable as an Ubiquiti (as in, never needs a reboot), yet is still a single box you can set in the corner and forget about if you wish. Or set up a mesh of their $20 units to blanket your three-story house if you're so lucky. (Nothing against Ubiquiti which I'm sure is great, but I've been a very happy Mikrotik user for year…

I have a Mikrotik HAP AClite. It's a great OS, I love the techy admin and shell access; it's great as a router, and rock solid (haven't needed to reboot it since I bought it last year).

But as much as I admire it, I can't recommend it as a wifi access point. It doesn't have an external antenna, and its performance compared to consumer routers is pretty mediocre. I have it running in my office, and in my living room (5m away, only a single wall between them) my AppleTV and Xbox One would continually drop out. Installed my old Asus RT-N56U as an access point connected to the Mikrotik via Ethernet, and haven't had an issue since.

Admittedly, I never tried fiddling with it to see if different channels or settings might work better.

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

#100

Post by lbenes »

silversmith wrote: post #50
shmerl wrote: post #35

> I got a variety of responses including that I should install the open source dd-wrt firmware... No, no, a hundred times no... Silly. If the author doesn't want to follow good advice, too bad for him. I'm using WRT1900ACS with DD-WRT. It works like a charm. > if I buy a product then I expect it to work as advertised and not need to implement hacks to keep it alive. It's not a "hack". It's installing a better quality…

In my experience, the DD-WRT firmwares are on the same level as XDA android images. Yes, the overall feature set is richer, and performance might be better. But all that is offset by some completely ridiculous bugs, like having to modify 5ghz wifi settings only via cli, because touching a single switch on web-based admin panel causes it to die (my current tp-link). And there have been bugs like that on every router I…

That's a terrible analogy. I use both cyanogenmod/XDA images on my phone and custom firmware on my routers. There is no comparison. The XDA images lack drivers, feature, and have strange bugs. While the DD-WRT is rock solid, years of uptime.

I flashed my parents classic WRT-54G with DD-WRT and 6 years later it was still running without a single reboot(networking equip on UPS). I also have another linksys that's sold as a router that I turned into a wireless bridge for the corner of my house. This also has never had to be rebooted. Finally my ASUS AC1900 has been running merlin for years now and also rock solid.

As long as you use stable branches, Merlin, DD-WRT, and OpenWrt are a huge upgrade in stability over factory firmware. Of course, you need to run them on decent quality hardware like classic Linksys or Asus.

TP-LINK is cheap chinese crap. It gets poor reviews for a reason. Even the best OS/firmware can't make up for hardware bugs.

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