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>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

by basch 8y ago

>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 other, to help hand off clients between them. All channel management will be by the devices working together, they can throttle down power if they are causing each other interference. I cant even begin to list all the different benefits with a single set of settings vs devices that dont work together. Even an asus aimesh network would likely be better. Youre asking for a troubleshooting nightmare. 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. (paying for the cloud hosted one, has its benefits, and is my recommendation.) Access Point - https://unifi-hd.ubnt.com/ https://unifi-hd.ubnt.com/ POE Switch - https://www.ubnt.com/unifi-switching/unifi-switch-poe/ https://www.ubnt.com/unifi-switching/unifi-switch-poe/ Management Interface - https://www.ubnt.com/unifi/unifi-cloud-key/ https://www.ubnt.com/unifi/unifi-cloud-key/ OR Cloud Management https://unifi.ubnt.com/ https://unifi.ubnt.com/ Router - https://www.ubnt.com/unifi-routing/usg/ https://www.ubnt.com/unifi-routing/usg/ You should never need to track down or log into individual devices to configure them. I dont mean to be a complete ballsack, but 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. It doesnt seem like the best advertisement. That said, this is the KIND of post companies should be making when their seo expert says to use keywords. Good job writing about improving the internals of your company, and not just what your company does. Write a V2 of this post once you upgrade, and rename the old one, "How we Created (and then mitigated a Device Management and Troubleshooting Nightmare)

comboy 8y ago
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.
- basch 8y ago
  One of the FEW downsides for smaller installations, is them not selling a Cloud Key, Gateway, and Switch in a single box.
  - sbradford26 8y ago
    I agree. Right now I have the edge router lite. I have it setup so 4 ports are switched together and then I use poe pass-through to power my access point. Then I run the unifi software on a raspberry pi. I would love at least a gateway/cloud key combo to simplify things. The separate switch doesn't bother me as much though.
    - basch 8y ago
      one more thing to go wrong in the field, one more cable to get unplugged. a key/gateway/24portPOEswitch would be a single device people can run ethernet to for APs, and plug their office pcs into. If you have a rack its irrelevant, but for some kind of trailer where its sitting on the floor... or mounted to a wall.
  - slantyyz 8y ago
    That's not happening any time soon. The gen2 cloud keys don't do that, although the gen2 plus model merges the cloud key and NVR appliance into one device.
  - pstadler 8y ago
    What are you talking about? There’s https://amplifi.com/ https://amplifi.com/ for, let’s say, less sophisticated home installations.
    - basch 8y ago
      which tends to fair poorly compared to orbi, asus, velop and others. a bottom of the pack product at the moment. its also not part of the unifi family, and doesnt have the advanced management interface.
    - 8y ago
thesausageking 8y ago
Came here to say this. No networking engineer would ever buy consumer hardware for an office of this size. It will cost a lot more in management, debugging, and downtime. Spend the slightly more it will cost for devices that are able to work together.
- basch 8y ago
  And its even bad advice for a small home network vs an Orbi, AiMesh, or Unifi setup.
sandGorgon 8y ago
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, this stuff scales.
- basch 8y ago
  which router is iffy for you, Edge or Unifi? The Auto VPN tunnel being right in all my other network and wireless settings is nice. its fairly obvious from my posts im awarding a lot of value to consolidated management. If you buy the APs individually, they come with power injectors, if you buy a 5 pack, they dont and its easier to home run back to a single switch. Less things to get unplugged.
- aequitas 8y ago
  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?
  - ISO-morphism 8y ago
    I'm not GP, but what drove me towards MT and away from Ubnt was Ubiquiti's history of violating the GPL [1]. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9331512 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9331512
    - lmz 8y ago
      Is the Mikrotik any better in this regard? Has anyone taken them up on the offer of a GPL source code CD?
      - 8y ago
sbradford26 8y ago
I always second a Ubiquiti recommendation. They have a great range of products that can serve people wanting robust home networks up to small business scale networks. In college I setup our fraternity to run on a edgerouter lite and 4 UAP-ACs and we went through 2.8TB a month with no issues.
vvanders 8y ago
Yup, all of this. Their HW really is that good for the cost. Ars' article[1] was the thing that pushed me over the edge and don't regret it at all. Rock solid APs, central management, isolated vlan+ssid just for IoT, just all around good. Was about $300 to get all setup and outstripped all my "pro-sumer" gear by miles. [1] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/07/enterprise-wi-fi-at-home-part-two-reflecting-on-almost-three-years-with-pro-gear/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/07/enter...
walrus01 8y ago
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 key' device on premises. Or if you happen to have your own hardware on premises a unifi controller on debian can be a really small Xen VM that runs at an average load of 0.02, your xen or KVM hypervisor can be as small as an Intel NUC stuck to a plywood board on the wall of a telecom room in the building.
- basch 8y ago
  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?
  - walrus01 8y ago
    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.
    - basch 8y ago
      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?
fastbeef 8y ago
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.
- sbradford26 8y ago
  I have my unifi controller running on a raspberry pie and it has been very reliable. Might be worth a shot.
  - fastbeef 8y ago
    I’m looking into hosting it on DigitalOcean, seems easy enough.
  - lostlogin 8y ago
    Having spent too much time on HN today, I’m going to try put a PiHole on the same Pi as a home controller that is especially under taxed. Will see if this combo works. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18075159 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18075159
- slantyyz 8y ago
  The new (but not widely available) Cloud Key Gen 2+ model is much more stable. It also has a battery so it can gracefully shut down mongodb after 10 seconds of no power. The + model replaces the cloud key and nvr. There is a non-plus model coming as well but that hasn't been released yet.
- wj 8y ago
  I need a wireless bridge and am a bit overwhelmed with the various Unifi offerings. Can you recommend a setup?
anderiv 8y ago
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.
- tvanantwerp 8y ago
  I've had similar issues with Ubiquiti in a noisy RF environment. The 2.4GHz spectrum was extremely saturated and people were frequently dropped whenever they were on it. Thankfully, the neighbors aren't using 5GHz too much--I just turned off 2.4GHz for our own WiFi and it seems to have solved the issue. Still, very annoying and took a long time to figure out.
  - anderiv 8y ago
    Yes, we actually considered that. Unfortunately in our use case, there were many 2.4GHz-only IOT-type devices that needed to be on the network, so we couldn't turn off 2.4GHz. It helped a bit when we turned down the 2.4GHz Tx power - that seemed to encourage more devices to jump over to 6GHz, but even that didn't solve the problems altogether. I'm not an RF design engineer, but for this type of equipment, I do feel like there's some truth to "you get what you pay for". It's plain to me that the Ruckus APs have superior RF front-ends that are better able to deal with the noise. They're more expensive than Ubnt for sure, but that extra cost was very much worth it for us, to avoid the frequent disconnects that the users were having to deal with.
  - rconti 8y ago
    I found vastly more expensive Meraki APs to deal with noise way worse than Ubiquiti (but that's all I've used so I can't compare to others).
  - basch 8y ago
    I have seen the exact same thing, 2.4Ghz runs a little overpowered, causing interference. Turn it down a little, doesnt need to be off.
jimnotgym 8y ago
I use Unifi AP at home and a Fritzbox router. At work I have a two sites of Unifi with cloud keys and an edge router. All visible on one management screen and super easy to configure. Fabulous kit. Make sure you take a backup of the cloud key btw, they can get corrupted by a power interruption, and then you have to install from scratch. You can do this from the browser. I wanted to caution people who are choosing Mikrotik at home. A lot of network engineers find their interface a bit weird, and by default they have way too much open on their public interfaces. I have seen one in the process of being brute-forced from ssh, that was installed by a qualified Mikrotik installer. If you want to plug and play the Unifi routers are a better option. Many have packet inspection features built in too.
- walrus01 8y ago
  The vast majority of peoples' houses don't have WAN connections that need the capabilities of the higher-spec mikrotik routers anyways. An RB3011 or RB4011 is overkill for a residential cablemodem or VDSL2 based last mile service, in terms of pps and Mbps capacity, and NAT pps ability. The ubnt ER-X ($48) is good for up to about 700 Mbps of traffic, and comes with sane defaults. If you have truly symmetric 1 Gbps full duplex at home maybe you need the capabilities of an RB4011. But you should learn how to lock down its WAN facing interface. The ubnt EdgeOS based devices are based on a fork of Vyatta. Ubiquiti hired most of the Vyatta software development team years ago when Brocade acquired Vyatta (the corporation). Ultimately they are little tiny Debian based boxes, since that's the foundation vyatta was built on.
  - basch 8y ago
    Why an edge router over unifi, for smaller setups (Triplebyte is what, 30 office people?)
    - walrus01 8y ago
      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 APs).
KaiserPro 8y ago
This a thousand times. The very start of a strong network is a solid Dynamic DNS + DHCP setup. The only IPs that should be static are the router's. In a small office, using your firewall/router is not a bad choice to DNS+DHCP. For companies < 100 and WAN connections <1gig pfsense is perfect. Segment your APs and servers etc into different VLANs with distinct IP pools, bonus point for different subdomain. This allows your to firewall it off to prevent prying eyes. It also means that if something were to get into your VPC, and then over the VPN, they can't fiddle with your APs quite so easily. As for ethernet always buy in cables, but get good sockets and patch panels. It is worth the money to hire a wireman/woman to do that for you. Unless you've been practising its a long boring slog, time you should be spending doing your real job.... Ubiquity again is a solid choice for wifi. I've deployed ~50 to cover 1800 person office. Beware, the non "pro" versions of the APs don't use proper PoE, so you'll be stuck either using their injectors(ok for small places) or buying their switches. SOme of the pro APs have built in speakers (https://www.ubnt.com/unifi/unifi-ap-ac-edu/ https://www.ubnt.com/unifi/unifi-ap-ac-edu/) which might be fun. They have proper PoE too, so you can use a real switch.
- basch 8y ago
  Looks like the UAP-AC-EDU is PoE+ I agree though, all my APs run on DHCP.
- cillian64 8y ago
  The UAP-AC-LITE used to be only 24V passive PoE but has supported real 802.3af PoE for a while now.
Aloha 8y ago
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.
- mmt 8y ago
  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.
  - Aloha 8y ago
    I sincerely question the value of a managed wifi system for less than 5 hotspots, I also am even more dubious of the need for a cloud service. wifi should function without the need to phone home.
    - mmt 8y ago
      > I sincerely question the value of a managed wifi system I'm not suggesting that there's necessarily value in "managed", but your parent comment was about the Ubiquiti product being overkill, which is a much broader statement. The GP certainly advocates for management, but that's neither the primary value delivered by the overall product, nor the majority cost (even with a single AP). IIRC, this may not hold for competitors, such as Ruckus, where even the lowest-end "controller" is quite pricey. > wifi should function without the need to phone home. AFAIK, Ubiquiti's products can be run standalone, only requiring management software for initial configuration.
      - mjcl 8y ago
        > AFAIK, Ubiquiti's products can be run standalone, only requiring management software for initial configuration. This is correct. I only power on the controller VM when I want to make a change. I do think a few features, like the captive portal require the controller to be online.
amluto 8y ago
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.
- josteink 8y ago
  Just DDGing now, I found this 2 year old thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/openwrt/comments/515oea/finally_got_80211r_roaming_working/ 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.
  - amluto 8y ago
    Probably. But it needs manual key setup, and the debugging the author used required manually recompiling wpad.
jiveturkey 8y ago
> 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.
lostlogin 8y ago
> 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.
- slantyyz 8y ago
  IIRC, depending on your use case, you don't need the controller running 24-7. Before I got deeper in the Unifi ecosystem, I just ran the controller on Windows when I needed to (when I only ran 2 APs -- in that case, you only needed an always-on controller if you wanted to run the captive portal).
rconti 8y ago
Usually these blogposts are written to raise the awareness of your company. In this case, not in a good way.
inferiorhuman 8y ago
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 primarily in the business of slapping a slick web interface on Vyatta they don't have the skill required to debug the hardware acceleration. They don't have a single clue how to get RADIUS to work with their fork of Vyatta. And their support is fine for a home lab situation. And let's not speak of the chronically overheating stuff.
- metildaa 8y ago
  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.
  - inferiorhuman 8y ago
    > 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 upstream support. Which offerings are on OpenWRT?
    - tmottabr 8y ago
      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.
      - inferiorhuman 8y ago
tareqak 8y ago
I'm curious: can the router you linked (https://www.ubnt.com/unifi-routing/usg/ https://www.ubnt.com/unifi-routing/usg/) run adaptive QoS with fq_codel on a 1Gbps/1Gbps connection? I know it's not a common setup, but some of the ISPs that do fiber to high-rises offer that.
petecooper 8y ago
>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 https://www.ubnt.com/download/unifi
tbyehl 8y ago
> All channel management will be by the devices working together, they can throttle down power if they are causing each other interference. UniFi does not do this. At all. The Auto settings are the same as basically every other commodity AP out there -- look for the least noisy channel at boot, transmit full power, allow any client to remain associated regardless of signal strength. UniFi has an ok tool for on-demand RF scans. It has all the appropriate knobs to tweak for optimizing coverage and encouraging devices with weak signal to associate with a better AP. But you have to do all of that yourself. Manually. Trial-and-error. There's absolutely no magic there.
- basch 8y ago
  yeah, I knew that and forgot thinking there was some kind of magic. too bad i cant edit these comments. by bad.
rgonsalves 8y ago
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-worrying-and-love-our-office-wifi-bf6064640550 https://blog.uncommon.is/dr-ubiquti-or-how-i-learned-to-stop...

by basch 8y ago

comboy 8y ago

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.

basch 8y ago
One of the FEW downsides for smaller installations, is them not selling a Cloud Key, Gateway, and Switch in a single box.
- sbradford26 8y ago
  I agree. Right now I have the edge router lite. I have it setup so 4 ports are switched together and then I use poe pass-through to power my access point. Then I run the unifi software on a raspberry pi. I would love at least a gateway/cloud key combo to simplify things. The separate switch doesn't bother me as much though.
  - basch 8y ago
    one more thing to go wrong in the field, one more cable to get unplugged. a key/gateway/24portPOEswitch would be a single device people can run ethernet to for APs, and plug their office pcs into. If you have a rack its irrelevant, but for some kind of trailer where its sitting on the floor... or mounted to a wall.
- slantyyz 8y ago
  That's not happening any time soon. The gen2 cloud keys don't do that, although the gen2 plus model merges the cloud key and NVR appliance into one device.
- pstadler 8y ago
  What are you talking about? There’s https://amplifi.com/ https://amplifi.com/ for, let’s say, less sophisticated home installations.
  - basch 8y ago
    which tends to fair poorly compared to orbi, asus, velop and others. a bottom of the pack product at the moment. its also not part of the unifi family, and doesnt have the advanced management interface.
  - 8y ago

thesausageking 8y ago

Came here to say this. No networking engineer would ever buy consumer hardware for an office of this size. It will cost a lot more in management, debugging, and downtime. Spend the slightly more it will cost for devices that are able to work together.

basch 8y ago
And its even bad advice for a small home network vs an Orbi, AiMesh, or Unifi setup.

sandGorgon 8y ago

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, this stuff scales.

basch 8y ago
which router is iffy for you, Edge or Unifi? The Auto VPN tunnel being right in all my other network and wireless settings is nice. its fairly obvious from my posts im awarding a lot of value to consolidated management. If you buy the APs individually, they come with power injectors, if you buy a 5 pack, they dont and its easier to home run back to a single switch. Less things to get unplugged.
aequitas 8y ago
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?
- ISO-morphism 8y ago
  I'm not GP, but what drove me towards MT and away from Ubnt was Ubiquiti's history of violating the GPL [1]. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9331512 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9331512
  - lmz 8y ago
    Is the Mikrotik any better in this regard? Has anyone taken them up on the offer of a GPL source code CD?
    - 8y ago

sbradford26 8y ago

I always second a Ubiquiti recommendation. They have a great range of products that can serve people wanting robust home networks up to small business scale networks. In college I setup our fraternity to run on a edgerouter lite and 4 UAP-ACs and we went through 2.8TB a month with no issues.

vvanders 8y ago

Yup, all of this. Their HW really is that good for the cost. Ars' article[1] was the thing that pushed me over the edge and don't regret it at all. Rock solid APs, central management, isolated vlan+ssid just for IoT, just all around good. Was about $300 to get all setup and outstripped all my "pro-sumer" gear by miles. [1] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/07/enterprise-wi-fi-at-home-part-two-reflecting-on-almost-three-years-with-pro-gear/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/07/enter...

walrus01 8y ago

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 key' device on premises. Or if you happen to have your own hardware on premises a unifi controller on debian can be a really small Xen VM that runs at an average load of 0.02, your xen or KVM hypervisor can be as small as an Intel NUC stuck to a plywood board on the wall of a telecom room in the building.

basch 8y ago
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?
- walrus01 8y ago
  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.
  - basch 8y ago
    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?

fastbeef 8y ago

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.

sbradford26 8y ago
I have my unifi controller running on a raspberry pie and it has been very reliable. Might be worth a shot.
- fastbeef 8y ago
  I’m looking into hosting it on DigitalOcean, seems easy enough.
- lostlogin 8y ago
  Having spent too much time on HN today, I’m going to try put a PiHole on the same Pi as a home controller that is especially under taxed. Will see if this combo works. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18075159 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18075159
slantyyz 8y ago
The new (but not widely available) Cloud Key Gen 2+ model is much more stable. It also has a battery so it can gracefully shut down mongodb after 10 seconds of no power. The + model replaces the cloud key and nvr. There is a non-plus model coming as well but that hasn't been released yet.
wj 8y ago
I need a wireless bridge and am a bit overwhelmed with the various Unifi offerings. Can you recommend a setup?

anderiv 8y ago

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.

tvanantwerp 8y ago
I've had similar issues with Ubiquiti in a noisy RF environment. The 2.4GHz spectrum was extremely saturated and people were frequently dropped whenever they were on it. Thankfully, the neighbors aren't using 5GHz too much--I just turned off 2.4GHz for our own WiFi and it seems to have solved the issue. Still, very annoying and took a long time to figure out.
- anderiv 8y ago
  Yes, we actually considered that. Unfortunately in our use case, there were many 2.4GHz-only IOT-type devices that needed to be on the network, so we couldn't turn off 2.4GHz. It helped a bit when we turned down the 2.4GHz Tx power - that seemed to encourage more devices to jump over to 6GHz, but even that didn't solve the problems altogether. I'm not an RF design engineer, but for this type of equipment, I do feel like there's some truth to "you get what you pay for". It's plain to me that the Ruckus APs have superior RF front-ends that are better able to deal with the noise. They're more expensive than Ubnt for sure, but that extra cost was very much worth it for us, to avoid the frequent disconnects that the users were having to deal with.
- rconti 8y ago
  I found vastly more expensive Meraki APs to deal with noise way worse than Ubiquiti (but that's all I've used so I can't compare to others).
- basch 8y ago
  I have seen the exact same thing, 2.4Ghz runs a little overpowered, causing interference. Turn it down a little, doesnt need to be off.

jimnotgym 8y ago

I use Unifi AP at home and a Fritzbox router. At work I have a two sites of Unifi with cloud keys and an edge router. All visible on one management screen and super easy to configure. Fabulous kit. Make sure you take a backup of the cloud key btw, they can get corrupted by a power interruption, and then you have to install from scratch. You can do this from the browser. I wanted to caution people who are choosing Mikrotik at home. A lot of network engineers find their interface a bit weird, and by default they have way too much open on their public interfaces. I have seen one in the process of being brute-forced from ssh, that was installed by a qualified Mikrotik installer. If you want to plug and play the Unifi routers are a better option. Many have packet inspection features built in too.

walrus01 8y ago
The vast majority of peoples' houses don't have WAN connections that need the capabilities of the higher-spec mikrotik routers anyways. An RB3011 or RB4011 is overkill for a residential cablemodem or VDSL2 based last mile service, in terms of pps and Mbps capacity, and NAT pps ability. The ubnt ER-X ($48) is good for up to about 700 Mbps of traffic, and comes with sane defaults. If you have truly symmetric 1 Gbps full duplex at home maybe you need the capabilities of an RB4011. But you should learn how to lock down its WAN facing interface. The ubnt EdgeOS based devices are based on a fork of Vyatta. Ubiquiti hired most of the Vyatta software development team years ago when Brocade acquired Vyatta (the corporation). Ultimately they are little tiny Debian based boxes, since that's the foundation vyatta was built on.
- basch 8y ago
  Why an edge router over unifi, for smaller setups (Triplebyte is what, 30 office people?)
  - walrus01 8y ago
    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 APs).

KaiserPro 8y ago

This a thousand times. The very start of a strong network is a solid Dynamic DNS + DHCP setup. The only IPs that should be static are the router's. In a small office, using your firewall/router is not a bad choice to DNS+DHCP. For companies < 100 and WAN connections <1gig pfsense is perfect. Segment your APs and servers etc into different VLANs with distinct IP pools, bonus point for different subdomain. This allows your to firewall it off to prevent prying eyes. It also means that if something were to get into your VPC, and then over the VPN, they can't fiddle with your APs quite so easily. As for ethernet always buy in cables, but get good sockets and patch panels. It is worth the money to hire a wireman/woman to do that for you. Unless you've been practising its a long boring slog, time you should be spending doing your real job.... Ubiquity again is a solid choice for wifi. I've deployed ~50 to cover 1800 person office. Beware, the non "pro" versions of the APs don't use proper PoE, so you'll be stuck either using their injectors(ok for small places) or buying their switches. SOme of the pro APs have built in speakers (https://www.ubnt.com/unifi/unifi-ap-ac-edu/ https://www.ubnt.com/unifi/unifi-ap-ac-edu/) which might be fun. They have proper PoE too, so you can use a real switch.

basch 8y ago
Looks like the UAP-AC-EDU is PoE+ I agree though, all my APs run on DHCP.
cillian64 8y ago
The UAP-AC-LITE used to be only 24V passive PoE but has supported real 802.3af PoE for a while now.

Aloha 8y ago

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.

mmt 8y ago
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.
- Aloha 8y ago
  I sincerely question the value of a managed wifi system for less than 5 hotspots, I also am even more dubious of the need for a cloud service. wifi should function without the need to phone home.
  - mmt 8y ago
    > I sincerely question the value of a managed wifi system I'm not suggesting that there's necessarily value in "managed", but your parent comment was about the Ubiquiti product being overkill, which is a much broader statement. The GP certainly advocates for management, but that's neither the primary value delivered by the overall product, nor the majority cost (even with a single AP). IIRC, this may not hold for competitors, such as Ruckus, where even the lowest-end "controller" is quite pricey. > wifi should function without the need to phone home. AFAIK, Ubiquiti's products can be run standalone, only requiring management software for initial configuration.
    - mjcl 8y ago
      > AFAIK, Ubiquiti's products can be run standalone, only requiring management software for initial configuration. This is correct. I only power on the controller VM when I want to make a change. I do think a few features, like the captive portal require the controller to be online.

amluto 8y ago

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.

josteink 8y ago
Just DDGing now, I found this 2 year old thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/openwrt/comments/515oea/finally_got_80211r_roaming_working/ 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.
- amluto 8y ago
  Probably. But it needs manual key setup, and the debugging the author used required manually recompiling wpad.

jiveturkey 8y ago

> 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.

lostlogin 8y ago

> 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.

slantyyz 8y ago
IIRC, depending on your use case, you don't need the controller running 24-7. Before I got deeper in the Unifi ecosystem, I just ran the controller on Windows when I needed to (when I only ran 2 APs -- in that case, you only needed an always-on controller if you wanted to run the captive portal).

rconti 8y ago

Usually these blogposts are written to raise the awareness of your company. In this case, not in a good way.

inferiorhuman 8y ago

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 primarily in the business of slapping a slick web interface on Vyatta they don't have the skill required to debug the hardware acceleration. They don't have a single clue how to get RADIUS to work with their fork of Vyatta. And their support is fine for a home lab situation. And let's not speak of the chronically overheating stuff.

metildaa 8y ago
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.
- inferiorhuman 8y ago
  > 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 upstream support. Which offerings are on OpenWRT?
  - tmottabr 8y ago
    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.
    - inferiorhuman 8y ago

tareqak 8y ago

I'm curious: can the router you linked (https://www.ubnt.com/unifi-routing/usg/ https://www.ubnt.com/unifi-routing/usg/) run adaptive QoS with fq_codel on a 1Gbps/1Gbps connection? I know it's not a common setup, but some of the ISPs that do fiber to high-rises offer that.

petecooper 8y ago

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

tbyehl 8y ago

> All channel management will be by the devices working together, they can throttle down power if they are causing each other interference. UniFi does not do this. At all. The Auto settings are the same as basically every other commodity AP out there -- look for the least noisy channel at boot, transmit full power, allow any client to remain associated regardless of signal strength. UniFi has an ok tool for on-demand RF scans. It has all the appropriate knobs to tweak for optimizing coverage and encouraging devices with weak signal to associate with a better AP. But you have to do all of that yourself. Manually. Trial-and-error. There's absolutely no magic there.

basch 8y ago
yeah, I knew that and forgot thinking there was some kind of magic. too bad i cant edit these comments. by bad.

rgonsalves 8y ago

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-worrying-and-love-our-office-wifi-bf6064640550 https://blog.uncommon.is/dr-ubiquti-or-how-i-learned-to-stop...