Why Did I Do That?

For the past week I’ve been messing around with setting up an old desktop PC. It’s a Dell that I bought in 2008 or 2009 or something, but it’s still reasonably fast. It does, however, have a couple of problems. One is that it has an Nvidia graphics card, and I’m using Linux, and the other is that although it comes with an internal wifi card, it’s from 2008 or 2009 or something. I only get about a megabyte per second, and the connection is horribly unstable.

I suspect the drivers aren’t very good.

So, in order to fix the network problem, and also because the corner of the room where I have this set up (alongside my work computer) has a terrible wifi signal, I decided to get a new Unifi AP, and a switch, and use it to connect to my network in a “mesh” sort of style, and then I can plug this machine, my work laptop and my printer into the same switch. And, just to make sure it all works, I’d buy another new AP and put it in the “comms cupboard”. That should improve the connection and also give me the best possible version of wifi on both APs.

I was looking at what’s available and saw the Unifi Express 7, and since the USG I have was pretty old I figured I could upgrade and kill two birds with one stone.

Forgetting that I’d sworn never to buy another Unifi gateway.

Basically, they don’t support mini jumbo frames and from the looks of it never will, the firewall is appallingly complex and difficult to use, and they just stop getting new features after a while.

Well, I got the stuff yesterday and spent the rest of the day trying to fix the problem I created when I removed the old gateway from the network: it was the only router on the network that was able to route between the various VLANs. So all of a sudden my laptop couldn’t see the Unifi controller, and the controller couldn’t see the Unifi devices, and there was nothing to hand out DHCP leases to anything.

And I’d neglected to get a backup of the Unifi Controller, not that that would have helped…

What I had to do was install the new gateway and set it up to the point where I had enough VLANs configured that I could access the old Unifi Controller. Then I took a backup and tried to restore it to the Express 7, which has a built-in controller.

Well that didn’t work! Turns out the version of the controller software on the Express 7 is really quite out of date. As far as I can tell that’s not because it’s new, because the first thing it did when I put in the PPPoE settings was update itself. No, it’s just several versions behind. This meant I couldn’t restore the backup. I went back to the old controller and luckily it runs automatic backups on the first of the month, and the October backup was an older version than on the Express 7.

I was pretty sure I hadn’t made any network changes since the beginning of October, so I uploaded that and et voila! the whole network suddenly leapt back into life!

This was the point where I realised I couldn’t configure the mini jumbo frames and remembered that I wasn’t going to get another Unifi gateway, but it was also too late because I wasn’t going to carry on with the fight to get the old controller and gateway back up.

I’ll see if the mini jumbo things is still a problem. I think the main issue was IPv6 websites just not working because there were misconfigured routers between me and them, but I can’t really remember.

I suppose that even if I choose to set up an OpenBSD router or something I can keep using the Express 7 as an AP and Unifi Controller, so it won’t be a total waste of money.

And setting up the other AP as a mesh router and the switch was simple as pie. I just need to work out where to mount them. I was thinking perhaps on the bottom of my desk, but I’m not sure. Just now they’re just sitting on top of things, which isn’t ideal.

Update:

I had some trouble with DHCP taking an awfully long time to assign IPs. Turns out it’s because the network was set to use “STP” instead of “RSTP”. After changing that setting the problem went away.