How we solved our office Wi-Fi problems

Re:How we solved our office Wi-Fi problems by xoa on Wednesday September 26, 2018 @04:12PM (#18079804)

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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Re:How we solved our office Wi-Fi problems by walrus01 on Wednesday September 26, 2018 @04:16PM (#18079846)

My home unifi controller doesn't even 'run' 99.9% of the time, it's not necessary to have the controller online once the APs are provisioned. It's just a debian stretch virtualbox VM that lives on my laptop, with its virtual ethernet interface bridged to the laptop's physical interface. I bring it up on the same L2 fabric as the APs if I need to make any changes, and then suspend it again.

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Re:How we solved our office Wi-Fi problems by xoa on Wednesday September 26, 2018 @04:51PM (#18080164)

>My home unifi controller doesn't even 'run' 99.9% of the time, it's not necessary to have the controller online once the APs are provisioned.

That's also a good point, the reliability is solid and things won't fall apart even without a controller. That said the controller is necessary for certain nice extras like stats, guest portal, etc. Granted the average HN crowd may have other appliances or systems to manage that, and plenty of people do use a controller locally installed on a notebook purely to adopt and setup APs and then never worry about it again, but given how cheap the minimal VM needed would be or Ubiquiti's local "cloudkey" (worst name ever, has nothing to do with the cloud, it's just a stick computer dedicated for this), I think it's worth considering having a controller running if someone was going that way anyway. Might as well have the management console up all the time. My only point was that running it is highly, highly flexible.

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