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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

#221

Post by kryogen1c »

Grazester wrote: post #218
kryogen1c wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My IT MSP solely sells and supports unifi WAPs, and I have no idea what you're talking about. We have dozens of WAPs under management across the city and state, and I've never seen any of the issues you guys are talking about. We don't have issues with database crashing or overheating. The wap controllers are configurable for automatic firmware updating, so I don't know what the issue is with patching. They definitel…

I have an office with a few of those and they are not great and do overheat. I am quite surprised you having been exposed to a great number of them never had an issue.

They have a lot of models and we usually sell ac-pros and ac-lrs. Maybe there are issues with higher/lower grade versions...

Re: How we solved our office Wi-Fi problems

#222

Post by amluto »

josteink wrote: post #206
amluto wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish OpenWRT came with easy-to-configure out of the box fast roaming and a centralized configuration solution. It’s otherwise excellent, and my home network based on OpenWRT works quite well.

Just DDGing now, I found this 2 year old thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/openwrt/comments/515oea/finally_got... Is this still valid? If so, it seems quite doable if your already comfy SSHing into your router.

Probably. But it needs manual key setup, and the debugging the author used required manually recompiling wpad.

Re: How we solved our office Wi-Fi problems

#223

Post by rayiner »

detaro wrote: post #126
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…

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 fo…

How much does the price difference really matter? An Ubiquiti AC HD is $300. You can get an equivalent Ruckus AP (R710) for about $815. In a small office, that might add up to a couple of thousand dollars extra for APs. That's like a week's rent for a Bay Area office.

Re: How we solved our office Wi-Fi problems

#224

Post by ShouldBeWorkng »

kryogen1c wrote: post #221
Grazester wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have an office with a few of those and they are not great and do overheat. I am quite surprised you having been exposed to a great number of them never had an issue.

They have a lot of models and we usually sell ac-pros and ac-lrs. Maybe there are issues with higher/lower grade versions...

You have dozens of devices in what sounds like small locations across your state. I have 11k users online in North America and I would never trust Unifi for any part of my network. They have their place but enterprise is not one of them. SMB is not the same.

Re: How we solved our office Wi-Fi problems

#225

Post by justusthane »

Jaruzel wrote: post #209
Blaiz0r wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had to change my SSID's on my 5Ghz and 2.8Ghz WiFi because Macs used to confuse themselves and constantly disconnect. Using the same name for both didn't work

Your problem is using the same SSID for both frequencies. Have a single SSID for all your 5Ghz APs and another for the 2.4Ghz ones.

That's the opposite of what this article says to do, which I think is why the above commenter mentioned it.

Re: How we solved our office Wi-Fi problems

#226

Post by basch »

ShouldBeWorkng wrote: post #224
kryogen1c wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have a lot of models and we usually sell ac-pros and ac-lrs. Maybe there are issues with higher/lower grade versions...

You have dozens of devices in what sounds like small locations across your state. I have 11k users online in North America and I would never trust Unifi for any part of my network. They have their place but enterprise is not one of them. SMB is not the same.

I agree fully, its not enterprise grade. Triplebyte is a 30 person office.

Re: How we solved our office Wi-Fi problems

#227

Post by danesparza »

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…

Outdoor network + airtight enclosure + summer + full sun ... 289 degrees doesn't surprise me.

This sounds like unrealistic expectations and a poorly designed implementation.

Re: How we solved our office Wi-Fi problems

#228

Post by aequitas »

frankzinger wrote: post #214
aequitas wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm currently using Mikrotik happily for AP and router needs, but considering switching to a Ubnt setup for ease of management that does not depend on Windows/Wine and without having to write my own configuration management tooling. As central management is somewhat lacking. What are your considerations for not choosing Ubnt for routing?

Windows? The MT RouterOS web interface works very well in both Chromium and Firefox on Linux for me.

The web interface works fine for me on macOs, as well as the CLI. But it's far from centralised configuration management. Sometimes you want to tinker, but sometimes you just want to deploy something (at friends/family) that works and when you return to it in a few months, to continue where you left off without going through every device's configuration or the documentation that is obvious not there as those side projects often don't allow you to 'allocate' time for that.

Re: How we solved our office Wi-Fi problems

#229

Post by aequitas »

sandGorgon wrote: post #183
aequitas wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm currently using Mikrotik happily for AP and router needs, but considering switching to a Ubnt setup for ease of management that does not depend on Windows/Wine and without having to write my own configuration management tooling. As central management is somewhat lacking. What are your considerations for not choosing Ubnt for routing?

the mikrotik cli is wonderful. you can script it all out. the UI is a little complicated, but oh well. quick question - why do you need windows/wine for mikrotik ? we use the cli commands through the web console. in fact we dont have windows in the office. granted you may be doing something more advanced than us, but curious to know.

I mostly manage my device setups with CLI/webfig. Sometimes winbox in wine as it is a little more reliable in mac-telnet then 'non-official' clients. But I long for some centralised configuration management. Even on small networks. Its just nice to come back to a complete overview instead of spread out configuration and out-of-date documentation for stuff you did months back for a friend or family. I don't know if Ubnt will fill this need, but what I've been hearing about it should.

Re: How we solved our office Wi-Fi problems

#230

Post by inferiorhuman »

petecooper wrote: post #197
tnorthcutt wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

For completeness, that was when the summer sun was shining directly on the enclosure in the hottest part of the day, during a country-wide hot spell. Still, no airflow, heat generation, etc. Every day, cut out. When it cooled down, it worked again. This continued for about two months, then they failed.

Sure that's kind of a worst case scenario there. One of the bigger problems with the ER-L design, IMO, is that they don't have any sort of temperature measuring device inside the case itself. They run hot even without extreme ambient temperatures so you'd think there'd be some baked in way to monitor the temperatures, but no.
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