Network Upgrade 99% Complete (For Now)

I received my second UniFi AP Lite yesterday. The plan was to have two APs in the house – one on each floor – from the beginning. The first AP was mounted in the basement ceiling which provided good coverage for the basement but parts of the main floor and outside the house were spotty. This was likely because of the floor in between the basement and the main floor. Outside was likely due to the concrete walls 🙂

The implementation was almost seamless – except for stupidity on my part. When I configured the port for the new AP, I added the management VLAN which allowed adoption and the firmware upgrade. However, clients could connect but would not maintain connectivity. The UniFi controller showed a boatload of DHCP failures. What was going on?

Well, another case of rushing things. If you have your WiFi network on different VLANs those VLANs also need to be applied to the switch port as well. Otherwise, when a client connects to a WiFi network, which is different from the management network, the switch ports sees the DHCP request and says “I don’t know about network x! Go away!”. Anyway, once I added the correct profile (I love the network profiles that Ubuquity has in their SDN) with all the right VLANs things go as smooth as silk.

So, the network upgrade is now 99% complete. WiFi connectivity is great across the basement and main floor. I can actually now get a reliable, albeit a little weak, WiFi connection in my shed. I still have to replace some cable runs with Cat5e or Cat6 and desperately need to clean up the rat’s nest in the server rack. Maybe Santy Claus will help me out there.

About Mike Pelley

Let’s see… A little about me… I’ve been around information technology since 1983 with computers such as DEC Rainbows (weird machine – the standard DOS couldn’t format its own floppy disks – remember them? – and I had to format them on a friend’s IBM PC) to Radio Shack TRS-80 to Apple ][e and Apple //c in the beginning. I have programmed in 8-bit assembly language on 6502, FORTRAN and COBOL on IBM System/370 (and I still hate JCL), VAX BASIC and COBOL (and a weird and massive WordPerfect 4.0 macro) on DEC VMS (Alpha), C/C++ on Digital Unix (ALPHA), and C/C++, Perl (it may be powerful but I still hate it), PHP on Linux (Red Hat, Centos, Ubuntu, etc.). I have work with databases such as Digital RDB (later to become Oracle RDB), Oracle DBMS, Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL and PostgreSQL on VAX, Alpha, Sun and Intel. Check out my professional profile and connect with me on LinkedIn. See http://lnkd.in/nhTRZe I still think that Digital created some of the best ideas in the world: VAX clustering, DSSI disks (forerunner to SCSI) and the Alpha processor (first commercial 64-bit processor – Red Hat screamed on an Alpha!). DEC just could not seem to be able to give air conditioners away to someone lost in the Sahara Desert! VMware is one of the best ways to get the most out of an x64 server. And I have tried Oracle VM, Virtual Box and Microsoft Virtual Server. Outside of that I am a huge military history buff starting in the early 20th century. I love Ford Mustangs (my ’87 Mustang GT was awesome) and if I had the money I would have a Porsche 928S4. If I had a lot of money I would have a Porsche 911 Turbo. I also play too much AmrA 3 Exile mod. Over 5,000+ hours... I have a wonderful son, Cameron. I have a long suffering (Do you really need all that computer junk?) wife, Paula. I live in Paradise, Newfoundland and Labrador.
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