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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

#31

Post by basch »

walrus01 wrote: post #27
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 also 'cloud' host a unifi controller on a VM somewhere and set up the APs for "layer 3" management, where when you originally provision them you tell each AP to register to a specific hostname. It's all done over TLS. Each AP just needs to be able to get a DHCP lease, default route out to the internet, and to resolve hostnames. A small Unifi controller can run on a $10/month VM if you don't want the 'cloud ke…

for comparison

UniFi Cloud Controller

$299.00/year for up to 10 devices

$498.00/year for up to 20 devices

$697.00/year for up to 30 devices

+ $199.00/year per 10 additional devices

When I include my time, one less things to break or be misconfigured, one less vendor involved, etc... $299+ a year is worth it vs $120 a year + AWS/Azure, but if youre trying to do it on the cheap, I agree with you.

Does the Unifi mobile app work with the setup you described?

Re: How we solved our office Wi-Fi problems

#32

Post by aequitas »

sandGorgon wrote: post #16
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…

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,…

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?

Re: How we solved our office Wi-Fi problems

#33

Post by walrus01 »

basch wrote: post #31
walrus01 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can also 'cloud' host a unifi controller on a VM somewhere and set up the APs for "layer 3" management, where when you originally provision them you tell each AP to register to a specific hostname. It's all done over TLS. Each AP just needs to be able to get a DHCP lease, default route out to the internet, and to resolve hostnames. A small Unifi controller can run on a $10/month VM if you don't want the 'cloud ke…

for comparison UniFi Cloud Controller $299.00/year for up to 10 devices $498.00/year for up to 20 devices $697.00/year for up to 30 devices + $199.00/year per 10 additional devices When I include my time, one less things to break or be misconfigured, one less vendor involved, etc... $299+ a year is worth it vs $120 a year + AWS/Azure, but if youre trying to do it on the cheap, I agree with you. Does the Unifi mobile…

For me, that's really overpriced, since the ongoing maintenance and updates on a debian stretch based unifi controller (which is just a JRE and a blob of ubnt provided software) is super simple and takes maybe 20 minutes of my time a year. I have a ton of things doing different network infrastructure purposes that are also based on debian stretch amd64 so it's barely any additional effort.

You can easily control 50 to 100 ubnt APs on the cpu, ram and disk resources of a $10/month VM. Big difference between like $700-900/year and $120/year.

Re: How we solved our office Wi-Fi problems

#34

Post by basch »

walrus01 wrote: post #33
basch wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

for comparison UniFi Cloud Controller $299.00/year for up to 10 devices $498.00/year for up to 20 devices $697.00/year for up to 30 devices + $199.00/year per 10 additional devices When I include my time, one less things to break or be misconfigured, one less vendor involved, etc... $299+ a year is worth it vs $120 a year + AWS/Azure, but if youre trying to do it on the cheap, I agree with you. Does the Unifi mobile…

For me, that's really overpriced, since the ongoing maintenance and updates on a debian stretch based unifi controller (which is just a JRE and a blob of ubnt provided software) is super simple and takes maybe 20 minutes of my time a year. I have a ton of things doing different network infrastructure purposes that are also based on debian stretch amd64 so it's barely any additional effort. You can easily control 50 t…

Does the Unifi mobile app work with the setup you described? If you are outside the network? Do you use a vpn client to connect your phone back inside the network?

Re: How we solved our office Wi-Fi problems

#36

Post by anderiv »

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…

For the cost, I'd agree that Ubnt gear is quite good. I use it at home, and rarely have any problems.

That said, I'd like to provide one caveat: In my experience, they tend to not do great in very noisy RF environments. Twice now I've deployed Unifi APs in offices with RF spectra similar to what the OP has going on, and we had nothing but problems. In each case, we ripped out the Ubnt gear, replaced with equivalent Ruckus APs (with their cloud controller) and haven't had a single problem.

I admit this is not a large sample size, but thought it worth mentioning.

Re: How we solved our office Wi-Fi problems

#37

Post by walrus01 »

basch wrote: post #34
walrus01 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me, that's really overpriced, since the ongoing maintenance and updates on a debian stretch based unifi controller (which is just a JRE and a blob of ubnt provided software) is super simple and takes maybe 20 minutes of my time a year. I have a ton of things doing different network infrastructure purposes that are also based on debian stretch amd64 so it's barely any additional effort. You can easily control 50 t…

Does the Unifi mobile app work with the setup you described? If you are outside the network? Do you use a vpn client to connect your phone back inside the network?

Yes, it should. Assuming you're running your unifi controller on a public ipv4 /32 somewhere on the internet (at some commodity VM host), it's entirely up to you how you want to lock down access to it. Some people do leave the TLS1.2 web browser admin control panel login exposed, but on a non standard port, other people set up iptables ACLs to only allow traffic from a certain IP range, other people set it up so that you can only reach the admin control panel login page over openvpn. Entirely up to you and depends on your level of experience with linux sysadmin/firewalling tasks.

However I am more in favor of having the unifi controller on the same premises as the APs, or at least in the same metro area network as the APs, in your own private network. Just throwing the L3 management option out there for people who truly want 'cloud' hosted everything.

Re: How we solved our office Wi-Fi problems

#38

Post by robhu »

sandGorgon wrote: post #16
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…

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,…

Haven't the Mikrotiks had lots of serious vulnerabilities recently?

Re: How we solved our office Wi-Fi problems

#39

Post by fastbeef »

sbradford26 wrote: post #30
fastbeef wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a full UniFi setup in my home office/house and it is glorious. It Just Works! Well, with the one exception which is the Cloud Key. I’ve yet to see it run for more than 24 hours before soft rocking and requiring a total re-setup of the network.

I have my unifi controller running on a raspberry pie and it has been very reliable. Might be worth a shot.

I’m looking into hosting it on DigitalOcean, seems easy enough.

Re: How we solved our office Wi-Fi problems

#40

Post by xoa »

walrus01 wrote: post #27
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 also 'cloud' host a unifi controller on a VM somewhere and set up the APs for "layer 3" management, where when you originally provision them you tell each AP to register to a specific hostname. It's all done over TLS. Each AP just needs to be able to get a DHCP lease, default route out to the internet, and to resolve hostnames. A small Unifi controller can run on a $10/month VM if you don't want the 'cloud ke…

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 whatever, not via Ubiquiti and not for any other 3rd party either. You certainly can use any of those if you consider the advantages they offer (which can certainly be very real!) worth it, or just plain like to do it that way.

Unifi absolutely has flaws and missing parts that are easy to run into if you push into more powerful aspects of networking, but overall it's a delightful foundation, and critically to me was the feature of zero online dependencies. I feel like that's the Net at its best, a smooth progression from your own random kit all the way up to multi region failover hosting or whatever but purely based on bandwidth/uptime/maintenance/cost considerations, never any permanent ties. Can centralize/decentralize/move around/selfhost/colo/contract out at will. Unifi can match where you're comfortable with, is has pleasant pretty safe defaults, and they're great about long term updates and support. At the end of the day I can forgive a lot over that, particularly given the contrast it is with so many other offerings.

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