Ubiquiti Unifi – Outdoor Support
So UBNT has this great controller software/hardware compliment called Unifi
Along with the coolzies hardware is a great set of software.
As far as the hardware goes they have a standard range and a long range version of the hardware.
It looks like 400′ and 600′.
The software has map overlays and a guest system. What I like is the centralized administration of all of the APs. It will go out and discover them. You can then tell each one to blink to locate them and mark them on your map.
The only think that seemed missing was an outdoor option. My contention was why not let the Unifi software control one of the outdoor APs? Well, it has been announced on this forum thread that they are going to allow the control of the Pico’s! You will be able to load the PicoM2 with the Unifi firmware in version 2.0, though there is no timeline on it yet. This will allow you to easily administer outdoor deployments such as golf courses and such.
I think I might be doing a large deployment of these relatively soon…maybe. Any of you guys used the Unifi yet?
I’m actually deploying these right now. (Literally on the job site.)
@Justin
Should you be working and not commenting on my blog, then? JK. What do you think of them/the unifi software?
I was waiting for the other guy to finish hanging the APs. Besides some provisioning issues with two access points they seem to work well. The controller logs when people roam between access points. It’s possible to lock a user to an access point. We are running version 1.2.1 on Debian linux on a Atom Ion platform. Boots in 15 seconds and is ready to go. Version 1.2.2 was released but the linux files haven’t been last I checked. The biggest question is what does the controller do and is it needed. Well it’s mostly used for provisioning and logging. After the ap’s are provisioned, if the controller is taken away and the ap’s reboot they still function. They don’t care. You could just run the controller once and set it all up but the ap’s will only talk to the controller they are paired with.
I’m still at the job site waiting for the other guy.
Bueno my friend!
I would like to see these logs dump to syslog or the like…something standardized that I already have running. I dig it!
It does support syslog in the controller software.
I suppose the syslog support would have to be in the unifi firmware loaded on the hardware.
Looks pretty sweet. I’m doing an Engenius deployment right now; 11 WAPs and that kind of control would be nice.
We’ll these AP’s all run a slim version of linux so having syslog built into them isn’t such a stretch. However, the controller software specifically has syslog in it. Some things I’ve noticed: Does not have any fine control over encryption used. Only has WPA w/ TKIP. No support at this time for WPA2 w/ AES. The heartbeat support needs some work. The controller keeps missing them and the AP’s apear to be going up and down but really they aren’t. Other then that so far so good.
@Justin
Bueno. I suppose the heartbeat is more than just an ICMP ping over to the controller…? Perhaps this has already been repaired in the version you are unable to run?
Again, thanks for the great updated dude! Many thanks for sharing the knowledge.
Some other guy was having the same problem with the heartbeats. Looks like it will be fixed in the next version after the one we can’t run yet.
http://ubnt.com/forum/showthread.php?t=30800
@Justin
Excellent. Beta test away my friend 😛