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

How we solved our office Wi-Fi problems

triplebyte.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 252 posts

Re: How we solved our office Wi-Fi problems

#121

Post by mmt »

Aloha wrote: post #55
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…

If you're in a position where you have a small number of AP's (less than 5) the ubiquiti product may appear to be overkill.

I've found that the threshold depends not so much on number of APs but on number of simultaneously active users/devices (arguably the ratio of those per AP, rather than total).

An office of 30 people sharing 3 APs will encounter problems even if those same APs would have worked just fine for a family of 4 living in the same space.

I've even found this to be true in a residential setting with consumer APs, where reducing the number of devices (by plugging into wired ethernet things that don't often move, such as media players and printers) tends to improve range and throughput for others, without adding more APs.

Re: How we solved our office Wi-Fi problems

#122

Post by orev »

Aloha wrote: post #55
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…

If you're in a position where you have a small number of AP's (less than 5) the ubiquiti product may appear to be overkill.

No, this is where they really shine. Ubiquiti is often referred to as “enterprise lite”, where if you really need scale usually other options are better. But at a small scale, they are excellent.

Re: How we solved our office Wi-Fi problems

#123

Post by TomVDB »

comboy wrote: post #12
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…

The above may sound like an Ubiquiti ad, but I've tested a few top specs routers about 2 years ago and settled with unifi for my home installation. I needed a good coverage and reliability for my home automation, e.g. when I switch lights on/off I want a consistent few milliseconds latency.

I installed Ubiquiti at home and it was a terrible experience. I really wanted it to work, but my wife teased me long enough about my "professional grade" installation that I gave up. She was right.

The biggest issue was range, which was much worse than what I got with I had with a traditional consumer access point (I had a TP-Link Archer C7.) It was not even close.

The handover didn't work very well either. Much older UniFi products used Qualcomm wifi chipset which had excellent hand-over, the later versions used Broadcom which didn't have that yet.

I replaced everything with Eero, which just worked.

The AmpliFi product line of Ubiquiti supposedly offers similar features as Eero, but that didn't exist yet when I made the switch.

Re: How we solved our office Wi-Fi problems

#124

Post by dogecoinbase »

inferiorhuman wrote: post #103
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…

Fine, I'll say it: Ubiquiti is not suitable for a business environment. They don't have a good track record of pushing out security fixes. They've blatantly violated the GPL (and introduced security vulns in the process). Their "enterprise" features don't work well (e.g. hardware acceleration, WPA+Radius). Depending on what you buy the PoE may be non-standard passive or it may not. Unfortunately because they're prima…

_Thank you_. I'm constantly astonished to see folks extolling UBNT gear for anything other than WISP purposes (where it admittedly fits a price profile that's unmatchable). Read about the first ~10 months of the ES16-XG DAC support issues. Read about how EdgeRouters could never approach even 40% of line rate with fq_codel running. Read about how they lied about the future of the mFi line for 8+ months before abandoning it entirely. Not to mention the GPL stuff you note, the inconsistent and semi-nonfunctional PoE, and general lack of support or consistency.

At some level, you really do get what you pay for. They are great for people who want to set up a "homelab" without learning anything about actual networking, though.

Re: How we solved our office Wi-Fi problems

#125

Post by myrandomcomment »

inferiorhuman wrote: post #103
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…

Fine, I'll say it: Ubiquiti is not suitable for a business environment. They don't have a good track record of pushing out security fixes. They've blatantly violated the GPL (and introduced security vulns in the process). Their "enterprise" features don't work well (e.g. hardware acceleration, WPA+Radius). Depending on what you buy the PoE may be non-standard passive or it may not. Unfortunately because they're prima…

I have run it at 2 startups and it works great. Current startup is all Unfi stuff including 3 switches and 8 APs for with around ~150 devices connected to Wifi. We use RADIUS just fine for auth for the users. No issues at all. We do not use their firewalls, we use PFSense. I do use a USG at home with no issues.

Re: How we solved our office Wi-Fi problems

#126

Post by detaro »

inferiorhuman wrote: post #103
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…

Fine, I'll say it: Ubiquiti is not suitable for a business environment. They don't have a good track record of pushing out security fixes. They've blatantly violated the GPL (and introduced security vulns in the process). Their "enterprise" features don't work well (e.g. hardware acceleration, WPA+Radius). Depending on what you buy the PoE may be non-standard passive or it may not. Unfortunately because they're prima…

Really depends IMHO, at least when it comes to the APs. Yes, it's not enterprise-grade, but their APs are also way cheaper than anything enterprise and do the basics well enough. Average small business office use doesn't require much in the way of features, although how long various RADIUS features took was a bit embarrassing (I seem to remember putting clients in different, RADIUS-controlled VLANs wasn't possible for a long time).

Never really trusted their other product lines.

Re: How we solved our office Wi-Fi problems

#127

Post by petecooper »

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 download it (no cost), put it on a desktop/laptop running Windows, macOS or Debian/Ubuntu, and use it when it's needed.

https://www.ubnt.com/download/unifi

Re: How we solved our office Wi-Fi problems

#128

Post by inferiorhuman »

myrandomcomment wrote: post #125
inferiorhuman wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fine, I'll say it: Ubiquiti is not suitable for a business environment. They don't have a good track record of pushing out security fixes. They've blatantly violated the GPL (and introduced security vulns in the process). Their "enterprise" features don't work well (e.g. hardware acceleration, WPA+Radius). Depending on what you buy the PoE may be non-standard passive or it may not. Unfortunately because they're prima…

I have run it at 2 startups and it works great. Current startup is all Unfi stuff including 3 switches and 8 APs for with around ~150 devices connected to Wifi. We use RADIUS just fine for auth for the users. No issues at all. We do not use their firewalls, we use PFSense. I do use a USG at home with no issues.

RADIUS support is a well known issue. In my case it works better with some Apple hardware than others. Conversely, the Cisco gear at megacorp has never given me any authentication problems.

https://community.ubnt.com/t5/UniFi-Wireless/UniFi-AC-AP-iss...

Re: How we solved our office Wi-Fi problems

#129

Post by mmt »

jpm_sd wrote: post #29

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

> Hire somebody.

This is easier said than done, even if they're convinced it's worth the money.

Not only are startup founders faced with the usual problems associated with hiring competent technical people (ironically a problem the OP is attempting to help), but this would be hiring someone whose competence they'd be much less qualified to evaluate.

This effect can be seen in "DevOps" (as a title) postings from startups that emphasize Dev (programming against a cloud API and/or "automate everything!"). That kind of redefinition is much harder to do convincingly for office IT.

Re: How we solved our office Wi-Fi problems

#130

Post by petecooper »

inferiorhuman wrote: post #103
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…

Fine, I'll say it: Ubiquiti is not suitable for a business environment. They don't have a good track record of pushing out security fixes. They've blatantly violated the GPL (and introduced security vulns in the process). Their "enterprise" features don't work well (e.g. hardware acceleration, WPA+Radius). Depending on what you buy the PoE may be non-standard passive or it may not. Unfortunately because they're prima…

>And let's not speak of the chronically overheating stuff.

Some-time wireless installer here, I bring a snippet of anecdata.

A recent client had the full Unifi experience for an outdoor network, including 3x EdgeSwitch XP (formerly known as ToughSwitch) in a single IP65-rated, largely airtight enclosure.

The network would go offline on summer afternoons. It was overheating, those models run hot and are not recommended for low ventilation areas, but they weren't convinced.

I fitted a thermometer, went back three days later and checked the logs. The temperature peaked at 143 Celsius.

Post reply on HN