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How we solved our office Wi-Fi problems

triplebyte.com

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Re: How we solved our office Wi-Fi problems

#61

Post by xoa »

walrus01 wrote: post #43
xoa wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with this, I don't even use a VM somewhere I just run it on a system I already had at home and point a lot of other sites at it L3, no issues in a few years. Obviously it depends on the kind of uptime and home setup you've got, but the take home should be that running a Unifi controller doesn't inherently have to cost anything, not even for L3 adoption. There is zero cloud tie-in needed, or even colo/VPS or w…

My home unifi controller doesn't even 'run' 99.9% of the time, it's not necessary to have the controller online once the APs are provisioned. It's just a debian stretch virtualbox VM that lives on my laptop, with its virtual ethernet interface bridged to the laptop's physical interface. I bring it up on the same L2 fabric as the APs if I need to make any changes, and then suspend it again.

>My home unifi controller doesn't even 'run' 99.9% of the time, it's not necessary to have the controller online once the APs are provisioned.

That's also a good point, the reliability is solid and things won't fall apart even without a controller. That said the controller is necessary for certain nice extras like stats, guest portal, etc. Granted the average HN crowd may have other appliances or systems to manage that, and plenty of people do use a controller locally installed on a notebook purely to adopt and setup APs and then never worry about it again, but given how cheap the minimal VM needed would be or Ubiquiti's local "cloudkey" (worst name ever, has nothing to do with the cloud, it's just a stick computer dedicated for this), I think it's worth considering having a controller running if someone was going that way anyway. Might as well have the management console up all the time. My only point was that running it is highly, highly flexible.

Re: How we solved our office Wi-Fi problems

#63

Post by [deleted] »

jmuguy wrote: post #45
jpm_sd wrote: post #29

> There’s no IT team at startups Uh, what? Are you nuts? Hire somebody.

I work for an MSP servicing small businesses, Triplebyte sounds like one of our clients. I guess since they're developers they think IT is optional and they can save on costs (and/or their time is worth less than ours, which I doubt). And then later those decisions come home to roost and it costs more to pay some company like ours to come in and do things properly. I mean hell with modern wifi like Ubiquiti or Meraki…

[deleted]

Re: How we solved our office Wi-Fi problems

#64

Post by basch »

walrus01 wrote: post #60
basch wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why an edge router over unifi, for smaller setups (Triplebyte is what, 30 office people?)

I wouldn't recommend an edgerouter for a small office, maybe something a bit more serious. I was describing what I'd recommend for a residential/personal small home office setup. Mine is basically a 32x8 capable DOCSIS3.0 cable modem that is a dumb L2 bridge to the cable ISP's CMTS, an ER-X router, a managed mikrotik fanless L2 switch for the LAN, and several $79 UAP-AC-Lite (802.11ac not wave2, 2x2 MIMO, dual band A…

>residential/personal small home office setup.

Home/Offsite - https://www.ubnt.com/unifi-routing/usg/

Office - https://www.ubnt.com/unifi-routing/unifi-security-gateway-pr...

Large Office - https://unifi-xg.ubnt.com/usg-xg-8 (sweet 1U screen!)

$110, and same management interface as the AP's and switches. As you can tell, im prioritizing all-in-one management very heavily. One, managed, cloud, location for all my devices (minus sdwan, hosted by that vendor.) But the USG can do Auto IPSEC, so if you have 5 of them, you can tell all 5 to automatically keep connections to each other open. I havent fully tested a complex mesh of USG's yet, but id like to. It's getting close to even sdwan being expensive, compared to what these things can do.

One of the things I like the least about the Unifi management interface, is having to edit each site separately. If i want to make a router or ap/ssid change, I have to open each site.

Re: How we solved our office Wi-Fi problems

#65

Post by slantyyz »

MBCook wrote: post #54
jonny_eh wrote: post #35

> Don’t put 5 GHz on its own band. Uhh, do they mean "don't put 5 GHz on its own SSID"?

I thought it was considered and GOOD idea to put the 5 GHz and 2.4 GHz APs on different SSID is because some clients won’t connect to the faster one automatically. Or maybe it was because all traffic slow down to the lowest level. Is that no longer an issue? Or maybe these aren’t problems as long as the 2.4 and 5 access points are physically separate.

I think it depends on the use case.

I set up extra SSIDs for specific bands on my Unifi equipment to force some wifi gear (IP cams that have since been retired) to always connect to the closest AP.

Re: How we solved our office Wi-Fi problems

#66

Post by slantyyz »

While it doesn't really matter whether you use EIA-586-B or EIA-586-A so long as you're consistent, I've been told that EIA-586-A is the standard in Canada.

addendum:

Re crimping RJ45 - the better way to do terminations is to use the EZ-RJ45 pass-through plugs like the ones made by Platinum Tools. You need a special crimper, but it's night and day easier. If you're using AWG23 Cat 6, you also need to make sure your plugs can handle those wires (not an issue with the Platinum Tools plugs).

Re: How we solved our office Wi-Fi problems

#67

Post by jiveturkey »

basch wrote: post #6

>Assign static IPs for infrastructure like access points. This makes them easy to reach when reconfiguration is needed Am I missing something, or did they buy consumer routers to use as access points? Triplebyte, I can save you a ton of management, troubleshooting, and learning time: switch to Ubiquiti Unifi or an equivelant now, youll have one pane of glass to reconfigure every device. The devices will talk to each…

> isnt it weird for a company thats mission is matching talent to problems, to fail to find the talent to adequately address their problem, and to be giving authoritative (mis)advice on something they are not remotely domain experts in.

SEO at its finest.

Re: How we solved our office Wi-Fi problems

#68

Post by jrockway »

MBCook wrote: post #54
jonny_eh wrote: post #35

> Don’t put 5 GHz on its own band. Uhh, do they mean "don't put 5 GHz on its own SSID"?

I thought it was considered and GOOD idea to put the 5 GHz and 2.4 GHz APs on different SSID is because some clients won’t connect to the faster one automatically. Or maybe it was because all traffic slow down to the lowest level. Is that no longer an issue? Or maybe these aren’t problems as long as the 2.4 and 5 access points are physically separate.

Software has been written that will forcibly disconnect a 5GHz capable client that is found using 2.4GHz. How widely deployed this is, I don't know.

Avery did a talk about it (and other things) a couple years ago: https://apenwarr.ca/diary/wifi-data-apenwarr-201602.pdf

Re: How we solved our office Wi-Fi problems

#69

Post by [deleted] »

MBCook wrote: post #56

It’s only sort of passively mentioned in the article but I am AMAZED at the number of people who don’t hardwire everything they can. Obviously phones are out, but why not hardwire every laptop when it’s at the desk? If someone’s using a actual desktop computer like an iMac then what’s the point of Wi-Fi? Clear up the signal space and get a 100% reliable and ultra fast connection.

[deleted]

Re: How we solved our office Wi-Fi problems

#70

Post by lostlogin »

basch wrote: post #6

>Assign static IPs for infrastructure like access points. This makes them easy to reach when reconfiguration is needed Am I missing something, or did they buy consumer routers to use as access points? Triplebyte, I can save you a ton of management, troubleshooting, and learning time: switch to Ubiquiti Unifi or an equivelant now, youll have one pane of glass to reconfigure every device. The devices will talk to each…

> You can either pay a couple hundred a year for the management interface, or $80 for an on prem tiny little stick that hosts it.

Or save more and put it in a Pi. If you have no idea what your doing it’s a great intro into the world of networking, ssh, Linux and docker, Ansible etc. But yes, this loses the cloud features.

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