Testing UniFi Controller 6.0.22 With VLANS Over MESH & The Problems With UniFi Products

tom here from alarm systems and we're going to talk about the problem with unify specifically related to this new six version of the unifi controller software and we're going to do a little lab demo here breaking down you know the things i have here i'll walk you through this lab demo and it's also part of a scenario that apparently some people had some problems with with the update that's kind of want to dive into is uh play with some real world technology here and show it working on the new controller also why i'm not ready to upgrade to the new controller but maybe if you did upgrade you didn't have problems you should stay on it so too long didn't watch you don't want to go to the end of this video so far it seems that if people have upgraded and don't have problems it's probably worth staying on the controller what happens if you upgrade and you have one of these scenarios well it seems to be certain edge cases that break and that's kind of the problem with unify but the problem is not really with unifi the problem might be with who unify sells to and i'll dive into expanding on that here in the beginning and then we'll jump to the lab and i'll leave timestamps so you can skip around and not listen to me babble and get to the lab part if that's all you're interested in or if you weren't interested any further you could have clicked already away all right if you can click the like button though and first if you'd like to learn more about me or my company head over to lawrences.com if you'd like to hire a short project there's a hires button right at the top if you'd like to help keep this channel sponsor free and thank you to everyone who already has there is a join button here for youtube and a patreon page your support is greatly appreciated if you're looking for deals or discounts on products and services we offer on this channel check out the affiliate links down below they're in the description of all of our videos including a link to our shirt store we have a wide variety of shirts that we sell and new designs come out well randomly so check back frequently and finally our forums forums.laurensystems.com is where you can have a more in-depth discussion about this video and other tech topics you've seen on this channel now back to our content we'll start right here and for some people this is where all the trouble began well more specifically with 6.020 which quickly turned into 6.022 as of september 19 2020 i do know there are some release candidates available uh but not really relevant to this particular video i'm going to be doing this on 6.022 because that's currently what the controller i have set up is running and what it wants to update to i'm not getting prompted for any other updates but i'm aware of release candidates coming down the pipe to solve more problems but this issue is a lot bigger than this and that's the first thing i want to address and it's partly related to this type of scenario right here this is a sierra i'm going to walk through a little bit later in the video like i said leaves timestamps but this is not scenario we usually set up so we haven't really experienced this problem and the bigger issue with ubiquity one they have a niche market their niche market is a little bit of interest because they offer a controller that you can host that does things well kind of at scale some people can split hairs all day and say well it's not really enterprise because home users can get to it and i especially know a lot of people in the business arena who really dislike anything home users have access to they are absolutely head strong on they only will buy products that are channel partner only and keep the general public away from it because i can't sell any product this is a quote i've heard from more than one it person or it company i won't sell any product people can find the price on they want channel partner only they're used to high margin markups etc etc this is what made ubiquity disruptive in the market they're going hey i'll sell it to people who are installers i'll even sell it to anyone who wants to go on amazon and get a link i'll put the prices right on unifi.com and or ui.com now and uh sell it directly to end users home users anyone who wants to buy our product can buy it and this is not the way of large commercial companies they're used to finding channel partners and value-added resellers who add very little value is generally my consensus for dealing with a lot of them over the years and my 20 plus years in i.t here and i've always liked when products have a easier sales model and that is a good thing in the big picture but when it comes to doing support and when it comes to dealing with problems it can be a bad thing i have worked with vendors i have worked with companies that sell channel partner direct so few people have access to this when you start talking about i'd say few it's still millions but when a product line has a problem you're not going to see it in mass why it wasn't sold to the masses the masses that may be using said equipment and i'm not going to pick out in any particular vendor except for one microsoft and we deal all the time with updates coming from microsoft that didn't go well that's pretty much a regular process since windows 10 came out hell even longer before that we've seen just you know poor quality control and updates and things like that that same type of behavior occurs repeatedly in the it world updates are hard solving these problems are hard writing code not easy and sometimes uh it's poorly managed on top of being difficult we have some poor management decisions being made by people who control the programmers and they push things out and people who work in corporate us nod in their head oh yeah i remember when they told me to push that update even though i you know 20 of the other people are going don't do it don't do it but some sales guy wanted to meet a deadline that he promised to a client so we pushed it out and the world lit up on fire but you're not going to hear about as much of the channel partner directs they usually have more private forums you usually just even if they have forums at all they're certainly not public facing most of the time you'll end up with just a lot of people who call and complain to the vendor that push the update and this goes you know i well i pick up one more vendor 40 next i've done some videos about them they've had some egregiously bad coding problems on there but most home users i say almost no home users are running out and buying a bunch of 40 net equipment to build out their network at home that's where ubiquity has a problem because they have sold to these individuals and there is a lot of them they make a substantially more noise than there's a problem so what looks like a small problem and you look at the scale and scope and size of ubiquity as a company and the number of units they deployed you'll see that people are just ranting and raving but then you start doing a count and this is where you need that other side of the number and the other side of the number is if there's you know 2 million 3 million units out there broke down between some number of users what percentage of those users are really having a problem me and riley actually talked about this and even he said out of the you know massive things he hosted hostify the number of problems from some of the updates were definitely terrible for the people that experienced them but as the percentage of the deployments as a whole it was not 100 it's not like 100 everybody had problems so it's not like the entire update went wrong and what happens is you see the noise because the people that pressed update and said no it worked and they didn't even bother going to the forums an update came through the update went through uh they never even looked at the forums you don't have their voices in here so unless you can get a concise it just doesn't work that way but this pretend we can get this analytical data that precisely we can get all the users who installed it 100 of them and report back and then we figure out what percentage had a problem then we would have a real number i mean i won't lie there's plenty of comments on this post that tell me people had problems and problems need to be addressed i'm not dismissing it i'm trying to let people think about this from a rational business standpoint and i've done this even with my staff many many times where we walk through scenarios where they start complaining about a particular product and hard drives are an easy example of that they'll go man this particular insert name a brand is a really bad terrible hard drive etc etc but do you know how many of those were installed in the field and that's where the numbers become interesting because if you say this hard drive was bad but 90 of systems because they were a good price put those hard drives in because they were the best deal for oems to buy well the of course they're going to go bad if there's not another one out there so as hard drives go bad which they do sometimes there's not other brands that people chose they all chose this brand so now and this is why i like backblaze for hardware stats you need to know how many total hard drives were there well that's the not the side you know you only know people who had a problem because they brought it into the store and said i need this fixed or you've seen it out in the field and go well i see all these fixed but yeah what's your basis of comparison this is where statistics are really hard and people can easily manipulate those stats to kind of you know massage data the way they want but back to my point and my whole ramble about this i don't think it's time to throw away ubiquity i see people going this is the end of the company i'm switching and tearing everything out and you know we've been using these we have these deployed i'm myself not exactly thrilled with this update and i'm going to hold off on it until i have more data available to me and you know discuss with people some of these scenarios but i will admit this is just one of those real big challenges with ubiquity is when you sell things to a mass market now other side of this we do a lot of consulting and you know i have a little spiel where i say high res one of the things people hire us a lot a whole lot for is setting up unified networks and troubleshooting them and they were always super angry that unifi support did not give them the help they needed after buying the product we don't find the product to be at fault as often as we find a misconfiguration a loop in the network with people not turning spanning tree or people and this is the other side of unifi when you hand to 10 users people turn off auto because they know better so they start tweaking every little setting in there and sometimes it's easier to start over because they don't even you know they're not used to doing it work so they're not documenting and journaling all right these are the changes i made in case they need to revert changes so that's my bigger complaint so to speak that the noise and people will listen to the noise and react to the noise as opposed to taking a concise look at it now the other side of it what's important about concise looks at it this is a community unifi develops this they give out software this is not something there's another i i can't get you a long list of companies that compete with unifi that give you self-hosted controllers because there's really not that many at all that i'm even aware of here in 2020 and i bring that up because hey if you are an innovative developer and you have some money and you can compete with ubiquity and you'd like to do a self-hosted controller and copy the unified business model i'd be excited to talk to you about the product but i don't know any of those people and that brings us to you know when you give all these knobs and things that people and end users can turn that aren't used to dealing with this equipment but i'm not discouraging to do it please this is how you learn but just don't separate the product and the noise or do separate i should say the product and the noise so you can understand and get concise and then contribute back to unifying some meaningful way i know they do not listen to the users as much as they should or could but at least if we start putting this information out there we can work as a community to get this better this is something i try to do a lot of and that's why at the end of this video well after i'm done rambling here i'm getting to the lab portion of this video to play out a scenario and show how it works and talk about some of the problems that someone in this is information from hostified that they gave me of what troubleshooting he did and just walking through that scenario so that's my rant about unify that's my rant about the end user community which just like i said i don't hate people or have any problem with the noobs or however you want to look at them with the new people getting out into network engineering i'm happy that unifi still continues to sell product that's very affordable for home users and kind of dive into networking you start building labs and things like that it is unfortunate though when these updates don't go quite as planned so that's my end of rant now let's start talk about the lab in a scenario i have set up here and we'll start right here with the unifi controller version this is 6.0.220 and i know like i said there's release candidates coming up i don't have the time to load those right now we're just going to do it with what is currently available and more bugs may be fixed i know there's still some random issues that are being experienced and they've got them documented here known issues vlans beyond uap wireless downlinks may have connectivity under investigation so may not and this is actually the part we're going to talk about because i'm actually showing connectivity here but we'll talk about some of the scenarios that may lead to no connectivity all right so there's that and we do have the map right here set up and the map part of the reason you see two of these there's only going to be one in here and the reason for only having one is the i was moving things back and forth in the ports here just fyi so this is our usg 16 xg then we have a unifi nano hd and a unifi nano hd and this dots here represent them connected wirelessly together then we have the usw lite16 poe and we have pop top 480 is my laptop happens to be connected to it now we'll go over here to draw.io and get you a little bit better idea what we have going on here so the internet comes in and goes to this little sg 2100 i have sitting here we create some networks which one vlan and we'll show that in a second here but we just basically created one network with lan and one extra vlan called vlan123 and this comes out of here and goes into the xg6poe then we go over here and power up a nano hd and then across here we have the unifi nano hd and then we have it plugged into the unifi switch lite poe that also powers this particular nano and then we have right here my laptop plugged into port 2 which we have set to vlan 123 and this is where i found it kind of interesting for the errata where it says vlan beyond uap wireless so unifi access wireless point downlinks may not have connectivity under investigation now hopefully and maybe even some from unified watches this video and this is where scenario testing is really hard this is documented from them that they know there's an issue and they've got updates coming and now let's look at the settings here so over here look at wireless networks there's our not the wireless one doesn't really matter for what we're testing here we have our lan native 192.1681 we have vlan only set up and it's vlan tag id one two three now we're gonna take a look over here at pf sense now here's the internet coming in over here this is our little lab demo network then we have our lan which is technically vlan 0 but 192.168.1.1 then we have vlan 123 which is one nine two one six eight one two three and then we'll go to interfaces assignments go over to vlans and you can see i've have vlan tag one two three so really straightforward i just created a wide open network we're not dealing with any rules just basically so i can route traffic off elan 123 i then defined it right here in the unifi and then i pushed out the network now a couple other notices here is the way the wireless bridging works now this is where the scenario gets to be something we usually don't set up you have this unify nano and we have another unify nano and we're actually bridging them together by turning on the ability to have them talk to each other we go here you're going to go to wireless up links and this is off by default you just put the little thing check click the click the box and apply and it turns it on allow meshing to another access point now allow meshing to another access point and why i don't usually use this people ask us all the question and i think a lot of people click that because they think meshing and roaming are the same thing that is one of the most common things i watch people conflate when they're asking us network engineering question is well i need them all to mesh so i can just roam from one end of the building each other and i've heard that exact sentence more than once i've seen it typed in forms what people are conflating is they think they have to turn that on in order for this to be at one end of the building this would be another in the building and for them to wander with a device to connect to one and when it gets to the other it goes over the other unified does that by default and the reason we don't use this type of scenario very often is because what what you're doing when you do this is you're telling these two devices to talk to each other to get the data over here so the data starts with my sg2100 and this xg6poe and then we don't have a connection to this device so when you tell them to wirelessly bridge to each other it'll carry on the data now i want to talk about scenario and why we don't like this you now have to take and convert this cable right here to from cable to wireless wireless grab a couple of the antennas available for backhaul convert them to wireless over here convert them back over here bridge them carry all the vlan traffic and now go back and forth while it's also providing wireless it's actually great that unified does this this is great scenario if you're in a pinch and you're going i don't have any way to get a cable from here to here but the devices are within range of each other to talk but that range obviously because it's wireless is very subject to interference so anything in between these two well that's going to cause latency and problems with this over here so anything that disrupts that connection causes a problem that's one of the reasons if we're deploying it in a business just because something's at the far end of the warehouse doesn't mean well you know we can't hop these a few meshes over that would be a problematic design because usually customers want extreme stability we will wire every one of them and people are saying well what do you do when a switch is you know so many meters away that it exceeds the distance of the cabling well that's when we put fiber lines in or do some other methodology of extending it or we build site-to-site bridges that are very dedicated and you do your due diligence to make sure these are focused so this is not a scenario we use a lot but a lot of home users it turns out do use this and a lot of people in these edge cases were the ones affected by this now this goes back to why the testing is so challenging so we have this scenario and set up and one thing i'll admit so far with the unifi 6 if you didn't notice this already and why i went to draw.io this tool here to draw this out do you notice what's missing is it doesn't seem to know that this unify nano is connected to this usw light and i'm not really sure why it realizes this nano talks to this nano but it kind of mystery floats this one here going i don't know how the internet gets there but it's on my device list guys so the unified mapping software not that that means there's a problem with the way it runs but this is something i didn't notice right away with the unifi 6. normally things on the other side of the wireless bridge show that way but this one's not but that was interesting or at least i don't look at this map very often but um i do recall at some point it used to work i don't know what version if it's been broke for a while um i may not have noticed because like i said i don't use it all the time but um because we don't usually use a scenario this is not one when we dealt with people who upgraded they had a problem and this is what a lot of people um seem to have a problem with that they went from five to six but one of my points of building this was to show that despite the unify mentioning vlanspan uap not working and let's go back over here we're going to look at the device we'll look at the unifi switch here and we look at what ports i have on here so we've got port 2 name port 2 and rename it test and the profile test what does that actually mean so let's actually edit that port we'll click edit on this there's my test123 vlan that i have tagged to this port so all is what comes down the ports all traffic comes to the ports but we've trunked it down to vlan123 so what ip address did my laptop get because if you notice up here i got the little things so let's see what ip address i got and we'll clear it to show this again to make someone happy that it wasn't statically sitting there but 192.168.123.100 simple as that so despite unify having it and saying it's under investigation this is also why it's under investigation and kind of back to my ramble a little bit we know some people are having the problem we actually worked riley had worked specifically at hostify he had helped a client troubleshoot this scenario now we set it up in a lab and it worked and i don't recall exactly what they had done it was based on a reddit post and you can go and read it and find where people sometimes just re-adopted things and it just started working this is also what makes it so challenging from a developer standpoint um and why it's so hard work during development is going well the developers and or even people like me we labbed it out i can't reproduce the problem that doesn't mean the problem doesn't exist but without knowing the exact scenario that produced it um i don't know now granted we also did not start at controller five build this out and upgrade to six at some point i only have a finite amount of time i didn't have time to do all that but i wanted to test this particular scenario and putting vlans across of a wireless bridge because i was told in or at least seen foreign posts where this didn't work so we wanted to test this out and we did find out it did work now um if there's more interest in me doing more lab videos like this let me know um because they're kind of fun to do when i have time to do them but you know this is a pretty easy scenario to set up where you do the bridging and set these up but like i said this is more like an edge case and not something we actively deploy so these lab ones are less about deployment so it was somewhere to say what's the long term stability of it well based on version 6 certainly there's some issues with upgrades for it but i don't know i don't know what problems people run into because meshing these together is to me a really cool feature to solve an edge case but our goal is always to hardline every single one of these to get a full connectivity for the best bandwidth possible and the least chances for interference that way every device has essentially what we call to like a home run back to the switch and you don't want the switches to try to keep bridging across especially when i've done you know jobs that have 100 to 200 to 300 of these access points out there you can imagine just turning on lots of bridging on there was definitely challenging now i will admit 6.020 and i commented on my other video um apparently somehow that got turned on and one of the interesting things is right now and we'll test this real quick we will move this cable over to here and then we're going to take this one out of my laptop and all i did was i'm going from here we're going to go let's break the bridge we'll not break it we're leaving the bridge enabled but technically if these two are bridged and this is now essentially you know connected there i should have a crazy broadcast storm going because i've now looped it now it does have spanning tree in it so that's supposed to prevent that but i know in 6.020 this was one of the problems people had was people who did do the essentially you know home run where you run each one of these to a switch but then have that enabled so they would turn mesh on they would just go into a loop of broadcaster arm and that was one of the original challenges people had so at least that seems to have been dressed in a 6.02 too but i'm not sure why people had that turned on i didn't try but a couple things and so far when we seen some of the updates it didn't turn it on so it leads me to believe some people may have had it on and we had it off so we just don't turn that feature on unless it's absolutely necessary for a client and like i said we just don't use it that often so it's uh less of an issue but if we go over here after we refresh the page in a few seconds here instead of saying connected wireless it's going to say just connect it and it'll you know establish the connection on the back end that's what we're doing here hey look and uh now it understands that even though this one is still showing connect to this now we can see that this is connected here i'm getting routes over here so yeah and i i don't know how long it'll take before it switches and decides oh yeah by the way that's connected hard line over there but it's starting to update and do that but i'm also not facing a spanning tree problem or anything else that's working properly now granted i set this up from scratch i did not import just like i said from five so those are my thoughts on the new version of the unified software the challenges with software development the challenges when you have something you sell to a mass audience but i still don't get me wrong unify needs to do better and if uh there was more competition in the market they would almost be forced to um this is that big challenge we have because i know people common forum question every time there's a problem unified people start hammering out well who's the best unified competitor that lets me self-host my controller i'm like i i don't really have an easy answer for that who's got a well-developed product i'm not saying there's nothing out there but i haven't seen anything quite as well developed as ubiquity the downside of a product like this also comes from it's complicated there's a lot of coding that goes into this and they're going to have to make some decisions at unifi to kill some of the noise by making a product a little bit better and maybe spend some more uh hire some more engineers which are really in short supply so if you're thinking about diving into uh coding and network engineering which is this is basically a collision of um that's not easy because people who do code net doesn't necessarily mean they were natively network engineers so i look at the challenges of writing it's going yeah that's going to be challenging there's usually network engineering teams and there might be a programming team but you kind of got to be both the right network software it's not easy not that that gives them a free pass just to make updates that are kind of willy-nilly and they could always be more transparent so um that's my thoughts on it i'm trying to be as rational as possible i'm not ready throughout unifying i want to keep using your product and keep doing videos like this and keep you know posting and sharing community information of anything i can because you know we know some of the people from unifi whether they're management or not are listening and maybe they look at it and they go hey let's uh that's a neat scenario let's play this out differently and go from there so keep posting the forums um just be more rational and show your log files that's another one just don't say it don't work that is that's a big problem if you can show log files and document it better that helps us and people like myself who troubleshoot things a lot more and especially people who write this software troubleshoot it more all right thanks and thank you for making it to the end 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Channel: Lawrence Systems

Views: 55,900

Keywords: lawrencesystems

Id: Yv7BEAK4nP8

Length: 27min 11sec (1631 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 19 2020