I was considering going the Ubiquiti way, but I'm using the dirt cheap ASUS stuff with customized firmware and getting over 500mbit on WiFi. The Ubiquiti stuff is pricy and given their nasty history with GPL violations I've abandoned it. I have to reboot my fibre terminal more than my wireless router anyways, and even that's only about twice a year.
Ubiquiti all the things: How I fixed my dodgy Wi-Fi
211–220 of 277 posts
Re: Ubiquiti all the things: How I fixed my dodgy Wi-Fi
#212Earlier quoted context omitted.
Come on, 50sqm are barely enough for one person to live in. That said, yes, 70sqm is pretty okay, and 500 is just overkill. Our "fits a family of four comfortably" size is 200sqm, I can't imagine what one would do with more than doubling that. Cleaning would be a pain. Also, software-wise, my Tomato-based router does everything described in the post, and I haven't had a single problem yet. It cost $100 (but it doesn'…
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.
MikroTik is where it's at. Pfsense is great, but wifi support is poor, it usually gets the job done. A RouterOS device is a great price point with good support.
Personally, I use Tomato on a dumpster sourced linksys, can't beat the price.
Re: Ubiquiti all the things: How I fixed my dodgy Wi-Fi
#213I'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…
I went in blind and set everything up within 30 min easily running the Unifi controller that needs a properly setup Java runtime environment on OS X El Capitan. I'm going to put the controller on a Raspberry Pi soon as well to move infrastructure software off my work environments. It's kind of cludgey to setup Java still in 2016 but if that wasn't your issue I'm not sure how you expected to install everything. It seemed fairly clear from the quick install guide that you need the controller daemon / web server running first and that it will discover the AP you need to provision.
I'll take an awkward, consistent Java runtime setup over random solutions for, say, Python web servers using all sorts of configs.
Re: Ubiquiti all the things: How I fixed my dodgy Wi-Fi
#214Earlier quoted context omitted.
I meant the unifi switches and routers
Then why did you say you never tried the unifi stuff?
Because I meant those lines of switches and routers. I think it its pretty clear from context if you know anything about their equipment that they have two lines of routers and switches but only one line of wifi gear and that I'm clearly referring to the routers and switches above in my reply.
Re: Ubiquiti all the things: How I fixed my dodgy Wi-Fi
#215Great story. Unfortunately i do not have the luxury to spend $2200 on the network infrastructure in my humble home. I do however have a lot of 2nd hand hardware and am able to invest some time into optimizing them for my family's internet needs. It may not be perfect, but it works 90% of the time and i learn a lot about connecting lots of different devices and (virtual) machines.
Check out RouteOS stuff from MikroTik. It's a little less user friendly, but solid.
https://routerboard.com/products/group/20
Re: Ubiquiti all the things: How I fixed my dodgy Wi-Fi
#216For 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…
My standard implementation for SMB is Mikrotik + Ubiquiti Unifi. The Mikrotik product line is comprehensive, from the smallest low-to-medium bandwidth solution (various MIPS-based routers) to high-performance multi-1G (Tile cell chips in their CCR line). It's amazing what you can accomplish with a $100 router: VLAN, every VPN tunneling method you can name (and some you can't), MPLS, BGP. I use them as remote office VPN tunnel routers, set them up for L2TP so I can do remote support, use packet mangling/traffic shaping for VOIP. All this on a $100 router.
Re: Ubiquiti all the things: How I fixed my dodgy Wi-Fi
#217I was considering going the Ubiquiti way, but I'm using the dirt cheap ASUS stuff with customized firmware and getting over 500mbit on WiFi. The Ubiquiti stuff is pricy and given their nasty history with GPL violations I've abandoned it. I have to reboot my fibre terminal more than my wireless router anyways, and even that's only about twice a year.
Yes, Ubiquiti is pricy. Yes, they have GPL issues ... but so does everyone in the industry.
You can mod off-the-shelf hardware and get decent performance. I've done it. The issue with going that route is stability. I've modded Linksys, Asus, etc. over the years and while they might perform well for a day or two, I always end up with stability issues and weird behavior.
Ubiquiti is rock solid and performs well. They provide advanced features out of the box, no need for custom firmware or purchase of licenses. There's a reason people like them.
Re: Ubiquiti all the things: How I fixed my dodgy Wi-Fi
#218I'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.
Ruckus hardware is better but 10x as expensive.
Re: Ubiquiti all the things: How I fixed my dodgy Wi-Fi
#219+1 for Ubiquiti UAP-AC, uptime 248 days and counting
Re: Ubiquiti all the things: How I fixed my dodgy Wi-Fi
#220As 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!!…
There's certainly also a moral argument to be made (as you say that I'm moralizing), but I was more alluding to the introductory sentence: "I'm increasingly of the view that both my time and my sanity are worth more and more as the years progress". For me reducing the house size seems like a more effective way of restoring sanity and reducing time needed than installing professional grade equipment, which is kind of insane and time-consuming if you do it yourself for a home.