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

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

#181

Post by dictum »

sheraz wrote: post #180
legulere wrote: post #139

As a european I find this totally ridiculous. 500 square meter house? That's enough for an apartment building with 10 units. Wifi won't be the only problems that are caused by such a waste of resources. How are those problems making your life better? Here DSL router/modems by AVM (Fritz!box) are really common and they do their job extraordinarily well for being consumer grade hardware. They also regularly get regular…

Seems like you are moralizing about a guy's house when the topic is simply wifi-reliability. Given who he is (the creator of https://haveibeenpwned.com/ ), I would just assume that he have over-provisioned his physical housing capacity in anticipation of a major event. :-) Seriously, put down the proletariat pitchfork and lets talk about the content. Maybe this is just his warm-up for putting wifi on his superyacht!!…

> Seriously, put down the proletariat pitchfork

Sorry for continuing the off-topic thread, but I'd like to point that a system where the non-1% can have big houses is rather more proletariat-friendly than one where only the top elites can.

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

#182

Post by ianal_uanal »

teddyh wrote: post #170
ianal_uanal wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Contrary to popular belief, GPL is not free software. You can't add restrictions to something and call it "free as in freedom". A truly "free as in freedom" license is one you can't violate (BSD).

Is a free society one the laws of which you can’t break? No, that’s called anarchy . A free society can have laws, and a free license can have conditions.

A free society is one where people don't have restrictions. And guess what GPL has.

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

#183

Post by lmns »

shmerl wrote: post #52
awgneo wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've tried DD-WRT and OpenWRT on this particular Linksys router and it was no better, but this is besides the point. It made me step back and realize that I shouldn't ever have to install a third party OS just to have a router that doesn't drop out multiple times per day.

I think the opposite. I prefer to have an open OS installed. It's a question of trust. And did you try the recent version of DD-WRT there by the way?

> I think the opposite. I prefer to have an open OS installed.

An open OS with closed source drivers? The comparison with Android XDA images wasn't so far fetched.

> And did you try the recent version of DD-WRT there by the way?

You mean the nightlies? They don't even release any stable versions anymore.

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

#184

Post by r1ch »

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…

I have to agree. Ubiquiti have some great marketing and slick looking UIs on their gear, but the hardware is not enterprise grade. They use standard Qualcomm/Atheros chips that almost every wireless router uses (Source: https://nl.hardware.info/reviews/5592/4/ubiquiti-unifi-acces...) so you are basically paying for software with a flashy UI and proprietary cloud configuration.

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

#185

Post by JshWright »

lmns wrote: post #159
eltoozero wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you going to deploy/support Tomato for your customers/family? Insert DD-WRT/OpenWRT here and then give up and get a MikroTik since you can actually eat your own dog food.

LEDE / OpenWRT actually are quite nice if (and only if) your hardware is supported by free drivers. With proprietary drivers, of course, not so much. My TP-Links with OpenWRT (I know, I should upgrade to LEDE) are probably much more stable than any other networking gear I've ever owned. Everything is old 802.11n gear powered by ath9k. But if you aren't into flashing your own firmwares, MikroTik is fine too. I use a p…

Why would you upgrade to LEDE before they have released anything?

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

#186

Post by lmns »

smhg wrote: post #125
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…

Some help for anyone looking into DD-WRT. I use it on 2 routers (a dirt cheap TP-link and a higher end Netgear) for >3 years. Both have been stable and performant. No known issues. Things are definitely better than stock firmware. The approach I took: - When you're new to DD-WRT, look up your router in the database on their website. Take some time to read about installation (and maybe configuration) on their wiki. I…

Why should I use DD-WRT? As far as I can see, they don't release any stable versions and their nightlies are broken all the time. The software in OpenWRT / LEDE seems to be much more up to date and they release stable versions.

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

#187

Post by _x5tx »

Ubiquiti Unifi APs saved our network here at the company. Because everyone here uses macbook pros our network is about 95% wireless and lately we where suffering with connection drops and poor bandwith. We changed all our APs to ubiquiti unifi ap pro, now the coverage is awesome and we don't experience any kind of problems. I like the fact that you can control everything from a unified web app. We have an average of 100 connected devices distributed in 4 aps.

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

#188

Post by lmns »

JshWright wrote: post #185
lmns wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LEDE / OpenWRT actually are quite nice if (and only if) your hardware is supported by free drivers. With proprietary drivers, of course, not so much. My TP-Links with OpenWRT (I know, I should upgrade to LEDE) are probably much more stable than any other networking gear I've ever owned. Everything is old 802.11n gear powered by ath9k. But if you aren't into flashing your own firmwares, MikroTik is fine too. I use a p…

Why would you upgrade to LEDE before they have released anything?

They release snapshots which are already quite stable in my experience. OpenWRT is practically a dead project, so you shouldn't expect security updates anymore. The last openwrt-security-announce mail is from march.

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

#189

Post by nikcub »

jon-wood wrote: post #126
nikcub wrote: post #5

The best side effect of buying proper WiFi gear is breaking up what is for most people usually an all-in-one device into devices - modem, router, access point - that are dedicated to each distinct task. The high-end gear many get for running open firmware can get expensive. It isn't hard to spend less money on dedicated devices and get better performance. What I spent on an EdgeRouter, AP AC Pro and a good managed sw…

Which Edgerouter did you get, because at the firmware level its quite capable of WAN failover and routing over VPNs if you've got enough ethernet ports on it.

I got the X - added it to my shopping basket as an afterthought and ended up using it as my primary WAN router (replacing pfSense on VMWare ESXi)

I had someone tell me on Twitter to try out the better models because there is a lot you can do with them, and i've seen references to it before on other forums (it seems it is common now to do VPN routing setups on EdgeRouters)

I might give it a go - I do like trying different things out to get some experience across diff products

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

#190

Post by shoover »

alkonaut wrote: post #113
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…

Have I just been lucky that never need to reboot my consumer gear? I run a normal N600 (Wndr3400) netgear thing that has quite heavy load, and it basically only stops during the annual blackout... I wish I had sketchy consumer gear so I could feel good about upgrading to this prosumer stuff, but that N600 just blankets my 2 storey house with wireless with ease, and never fails it seems :/ First world problems.

Same here. AT&T's 2wire residential gateway worked great for me for 5+ years until the wifi could no longer get the job done from upstairs in one corner of the house to the xbox downstairs in the other corner. I added a more powerful WNDR3700 in the same spot and was back in business.
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