How we solved our office Wi-Fi problems • Hacker News Board

Re: How we solved our office Wi-Fi problems

#161

Post by scolby33 » Thu, Sep 27, 2018, 2:51 AM UTC

PascLeRasc wrote: post #8

teeray wrote: post #3

> Use fast DNS servers I use GRC's DNS Benchmark tool[1] for this whenever I set up DHCP somewhere, and the results are sometimes surprising. If you're on a *nix or macOS, it runs well under Wine. [1] https://www.grc.com/dns/benchmark.htm

This is great if you're at home or there's no IT team like in the article (a dream come true!) but if you're in a more corporate network these kinds of tools will usually ping NSFW servers. I also prefer namebench ( https://github.com/google/namebench ) since it runs at the command line.

What sort of DNS server is NSFW? I can't imagine that any DNS benchmark would need to reach out to anything other than a DNS server. If I recall correctly, the GRC DNS benchmark uses a set of domains set up expressly for the benchmark itself.

Re: How we solved our office Wi-Fi problems

#162

Post by benjaminl » Thu, Sep 27, 2018, 3:00 AM UTC

Serow225 wrote: post #153

dogecoinbase wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

_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 abandoni…

Whats the better alternative to fit the needs of a shoestring startup (say 5-10devs)?

I have had good experience with MikroTik products. The are at a similar price point, but with a less refined interface but a lot more flexibility.

Re: How we solved our office Wi-Fi problems

#163

Post by tnorthcutt » Thu, Sep 27, 2018, 3:08 AM UTC

petecooper wrote: post #130

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…

>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 recommende…

143 Celsius??? That's 289.4 Fahrenheit, which I find difficult to believe. Not impossible... just difficult. That's quite impressive.

Re: How we solved our office Wi-Fi problems

#164

Post by rgonsalves » Thu, Sep 27, 2018, 3:12 AM UTC

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…

Yes, this is a really technical looking article, with exactly the wrong approach. I wrote up a quick thing a few weeks ago about how we set up our office WiFi (tiny office - ~25 people), on Ubiquiti: https://blog.uncommon.is/dr-ubiquti-or-how-i-learned-to-stop...

Re: How we solved our office Wi-Fi problems

#165

Post by gruez » Thu, Sep 27, 2018, 3:17 AM UTC

Johnny555 wrote: post #132

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…

Ubiquiti is not suitable for a business environment I'd say that Ubiquiti is perfectly suited for a small business environment -- definitely a big step up from discrete consumer Asus routers throughout the office with no central management (and probably haven't been patched since the day they were installed). Ubiquiti may not be suitable for a mid to large sized business, but for up to a ~100 person office or so, the…

Asus-Merlin firmware is regularly patched and is available on many models

Re: How we solved our office Wi-Fi problems

#166

Post by knorker » Thu, Sep 27, 2018, 3:20 AM UTC

I disagree on the channel width. Yes, a packet uses double the bandwidth, thus double the chance of collision. But also half the time so half the chance of collision.

And you can get more channels than 3, if you use 20Mhz channels, not the 22MHz channels by simply not using 802.11b. only use g&n and you get four channels.

And do use the DFS channels, exactly because people like this author are not there to congest the channel. Just make sure you have non-DFS too while the DFS AP is in listen mode.

So this article is very much not written by an expert.

Re: How we solved our office Wi-Fi problems

#167

Post by tmottabr » Thu, Sep 27, 2018, 3:20 AM UTC

inferiorhuman wrote: post #117

metildaa wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note that nearly all of Ubiquiti's offerings are running modified OpenWRT, with a handful running a fork of VyOS which happens to be Debian plus some packages.

> Note that nearly all of Ubiquiti's offerings are running modified OpenWRT, with a handful running a fork of VyOS which happens to be Debian plus some packages. EdgeOS is a Vyatta fork. Has Ubnt abandoned EdgeOS? It's been a few months since I've looked, but the version of Debian that's being used was end-of-lifed on MIPSLE hardware a while back so security updates are entirely incumbent upon Ubnt. There is no upstr…

The next version of EdgeOS , 2.0 that is currently in alpha, was rebased to Strech so this should be fixed soon enough.

Their Unifi APs have option of a LEDE based firmware option, but think it is just beta at the moment. You can choose between the LEDE version and the regular version.

Re: How we solved our office Wi-Fi problems

#168

Post by hirsin » Thu, Sep 27, 2018, 3:28 AM UTC

tnorthcutt wrote: post #163

petecooper wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 recommende…

143 Celsius ??? That's 289.4 Fahrenheit, which I find difficult to believe. Not impossible... just difficult. That's quite impressive.

The heat problems are real. I mounted one to the underside of a cabinet, and it melted the plastic lining on the opposite side of the wood. They run extremely hot.

Re: How we solved our office Wi-Fi problems

#169

Post by sandGorgon » Thu, Sep 27, 2018, 3:28 AM UTC

mtgx wrote: post #99

sandGorgon wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same as this , except with one change. For the router, use the (cheaper and more powerful) Mikrotik Routerboards. We don't use a Poe switch - we just use cheap Poe adapters and connect directly to the routerboard. For those who have never touched a Ubiquiti, configuring it could be a little iffy . I normally advise setting up DHCP 43 advertisement on the router before trying to setup the access points. But seriously,…

Mikrotik routers were just hacked pretty badly. I'm not so sure they are competent enough with the security of their routers now, even if their routers are otherwise good value.

The CVE-2018-14847 was responsibly disclosed and patched. However, the problem happened with routers that did not get updated. This is no different than any other unpatched software.

https://blog.mikrotik.com/security/winbox-vulnerability.html

Re: How we solved our office Wi-Fi problems

#170

Post by inferiorhuman » Thu, Sep 27, 2018, 3:36 AM UTC

tnorthcutt wrote: post #163

petecooper wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 recommende…

143 Celsius ??? That's 289.4 Fahrenheit, which I find difficult to believe. Not impossible... just difficult. That's quite impressive.

If memory serves the ER-L idles at around 40C exterior temp. That was the primary reason I went with the ER-X despite hooking it up to a gigabit uplink.