First Impressions of Ubiquiti UniFi

I am really pleased with my Ubiquiti Unifi WiFi installation. My first impressions are very positive. The controller is great software. The interface makes all the configuration central and easy. Where I used to have to log into 3 APs (none of which I could keep straight), now I can just log into one place, and see everything.

It lets you see everything that is connected, and its IP information. Further, you can edit the names for them so you can write a descriptive name if the system can’t figure out a DNS name.

The configuration is basically pretty simple, and incredibly comprehensive.

What I Did

My plan for this was to replace my old APs one-by-one so that there would not be any outage. I almost achieved this. The outage-free part is not some crazy SLA in my house, but a lack on outage means I can actually do this project while the kids are distracted by NetFlix.

I installed the back AP first, and it immediately showed up in the controller to be ‘adopted’. I’m not going to show screenshots of that because it’s so intuitive and it’s in their documentation.

Once it was adopted, the radios are dormant, waiting for something to do. I decided to do the 5G component first; my network is called ‘nostromo’. Can you guess the name of a movie I like?

Ubiquiti Unifi WLAN Setup

I created a WLAN group called ‘Nostromo’:

This is what you assign to a radio. It will contain the SSIDs that go together.

I started with an SSID called ‘nostromo’, with the same WPA2 key as my old one:

Once I had tested that for a night, I went on and installed my other 2 APs. The first I put at the apex of my attic roof. After a lot of pondering NetSpot, I figured that a perch on the attic roof would ‘shine’ down and mostly only have the ceiling to penetrate. It seems ok. The second AP is more problematic.

How it Looks

Here you can see the ground floor of my house. I moved the AP, and the SNR in the living and dining rooms weakened a lot.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

First, hats off again to NetSpot for being able to see how this all works. The issue with my ground floor is that there is a vertical air conditioning duct that casts a huge shadow.

I have ham-fistedly shown it in the picture to the left. This shadow is very visible in the heatmaps above. Originally, I had an AP (purple blob) on the wall to the left of the AC duct (in red), now it’s in the stairwell. I’m not sure, given the layout of the house, and given that we’re trying to make the APs invisible, how I’m going to pull this off without another AP. We’ll see.

Nevertheless, it’s pretty awesome. With the APs set up, and the radios configured, I have accomplished 2 of my initial goals:

The WiFi is better. Devices switch between APs much better, and I can see it in real time via the controller.

I have a total inventory of what is connected to my network. This is also really cool. The Controller lets me know all the devices, how they are connected, and how they are using bandwidth.

Next Steps

Next, I have a few prosaic things I want to do before I start to divide up my network.

First, I want to use LetsEncrypt to generate and renew SSL certificates for my file server, and second, I want to start to move stuff to my IOT network, and maybe figure out RADIUS authentication to the network.

The Outage

The outage happened after everything was running smoothly. I was reviewing my logs and I saw number of these errors:

Discarding the BPDU on port 0/1, since it is an invalid BPDU type

I googled it, and the suggestion I got was that my old switch and one new Ubibuiti switch were disagreeing on an STP (Spanning Tree Protocol) issue, and I figured that all I needed to do was log into my old switch, fiddle a bit with the STP settings, and it would clear up. It did not end well. I had to factory reset my old switch to fix it. My old switch was mounted to the wall under my basement stairs. Way in the back. I had to take everything apart and put it back. Sigh…

What I’m listening to as I do this:

Social Distortion’s Social Distortion  on LP. I don’t remember who got me into them in high school, but I listened to this CD on repeat as I read the Lord or the Rings Trilogy. Love this album.All Posts