'Dad, the internet's slow!'
'Dad, can you restart the Wifi?'
'Dad, will we ever have WiFi in the kitchen?'
It was getting tiresome. A few years ago, I'd augmented the ISP all-in-one modem/router/WiFi with an Archer wireless router and a couple of Huawei extenders. This was an improvement, but never a satisfactory, long-term solution.
I'd been reading a lot about the Unifi range from Ubiquity and this week bit the bullet and purchased;
The idea was to provide decent wifi throughout the house, with 2x access points connected to the Switch from which they would receive both data and power. As an added bonus, the fully managed switch also supports link aggregation, so I could leverage both ethernet ports on my recently reconstructed MediaServer8.
Despite copious amounts of reading & research, and pre-installing the Unifi Controller Docker on unRaid, setup was not as smooth as it might have been.
I started with the switch. Powered it up and connected it to my Netgear unmanaged switch. It showed up in Unifi software and suggested a firmware update, which went fine. Next stage was Adoptation, which did not go fine.
It turned out that to adopt into the location, the device makes calls to http://unifi:8080/inform. As my cheap & cheerful ISP router does not support local resolution, I had to follow the force adoption process meaning I had to ssh into the switch and run a command to tell the device the IP address of the Unifi software.
set-inform http://ip-of-controller:8080/inform
There are a few gotchas here as well. Prior to adoption, the switch had the default ubnt/ubnt username & password. After adoption, the ssh access changed to that set up in the Unifi Site Settings;
Further, over the subsequent days, I would log in to the Unifi software and find that some of the devices had reverted to adoption mode and were again failing.
Quickly getting tired of ssh'ing into them all to reset the inform url, I went ahead and added my unRaid IP to the hosts file on each device;
SwitchUS-8-60W-US.v4.0.54# cat /etc/hosts
127.0.0.1 localhost.localdomain localhost
127.0.1.1 SwitchUS-8-60W
SwitchUS-8-60W-US.v4.0.54# echo 192.168.1.99 unifi >> /etc/hosts
SwitchUS-8-60W-US.v4.0.54# cat /etc/hosts
127.0.0.1 localhost.localdomain localhost
127.0.1.1 SwitchUS-8-60W
192.168.1.99 unifi
Fun fact: as part of this, I also learned a new Linux command: SED, which allows for the deletion of lines from a text file where no editor is available. Handy when you add the incorrect IP to the hosts file!
Now I could ping unifi from each device and it would connect.
With all that worked out, I now have a much better wireless network and an astounding set of management, reporting and configuration tools via the Unifi software.
One of my favourite features is the Map that allows placement of various devices to see how they will work in particular locations.;
I'm really only dipping my toes in at the moment and have a very simple setup. However, in the near future, I plan to;
- Add a USG to unlock some additional features and capabilities on the network
- Set up a VLAN to isolate all IoT device traffic
- Set up guest access
- Add another UAP-AC-IW Access Point to service the rear of the house, backyard and garage
Onwards & upwards.
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