TP-Link Omada OC200 Setup and Configuration

[Music] hey what's going on everybody today we're going to be taking a look at the TPL link omada oc200 Hardware controller now if you're unsure what this is it's basically just a tiny piece of uh equipment that runs the omata controller software so when you set up a tplink omata network usually you install the controller to a server somewhere or maybe you just manage your access points in Standalone mode but this is just uh to have a dedicated piece of Hardware to run your controller so you don't have to worry about having that whole server or whole desktop on 24/7 just to run your controller software and for the purposes of this video we're just going to set up the hardware controller and add a few access points to it if you've used the controller software before it is the exact same really the only uh nuances here is just the physical connections and getting uh connected to your Hardware controller for the first time to set it up so let's go ahead and jump right into this and all we're going to do we're just going to take our omata controller and plug it into our power over ethernet switch now there's two options for power on this uh controller you can either power it through the first ethernet port which is what we're going to do if you connect that to a switch that has power over ethernet capabilities then you don't have to worry about any sort of external power but if you don't have that there is this plugin on the back which is a micro USB connection and you can use a micro USB cable with a wall wart to power this device now let's go ahead and just kind of look at the topology here um we have our power over ethernet switch which we are plugging our oc200 into now for the purposes of this video Let's just say our switch is a dumb switch it doesn't have any sort of advanced VLAN configuration or any of that on it so the omata controller is going to be on our same network and for the purposes of this video this switch is just one single VLAN it's a flat Network we're going to assume we already have stuff like desktops and whatnot hooked up to it and we're also going to assume that you already have a router of some sort which will be handing out addresses via DHCP and then what we're going to add later is just three new access points off of the switch and we're going to manage them with our omata controller so how do we do this well first there's a couple of uh nuances depending on your network in mine I already have a wireless access point set up so we're already getting Wireless in my house and that's the first way I'm going to find this uh Hardware controller the second way is really just to check your DHCP server log into your router or whatever is handing out addresses on your network and find the omata controller it should have grabbed an address via DHCP if it is enabled and then all you have to do is browse to that IP address so write that down make sure you remember it and if you don't have DHCP for some reason I do believe that these uh default back to 192168 d120 don't quote me on that yet we can uh take a look at it once we actually get into the device but it does have an IP that it falls back to if 50 hcp is unavailable now the way I'm going to set this up is with the omada mobile app if you don't have it just go to the App Store and look for tplink omada and we can see I already have two controllers listed in this app December omada is the controller that's running on a server right now so that is how I already have wireless because I already have a software controller and then we can see toasty omada here which is actually no longer in use so I'm going to go ahead and delete that out and we're just going to go to add a new controller and right here it shows up a mod controller and the designator so as long as your phone is on the same network as your Hardware controller then it should just automatically show up here in the app so we're going to go ahead and tap that and go through the controller setup so let's get started what do we want to name it we'll just call this something like home- omada and we'll leave um country United States and the time zone set this to where you're actually located so instead of UTC we are going to go to Central Time US and Canada because that is where I am located and we will accept and confirm actually let's not confirm to join the user experience Improvement I don't feel like doing that we'll just accept the terms of use now it asks you for your application scenario I still am a little bit confused over exactly what these do in my original unboxing I kind of specul ated that maybe this has to do with like the density and the wireless settings and stuff like that but ever since I've been actually using this equipment I haven't really noticed any sort of difference between which you choose so we're going to go ahead and just put this on home hit next and then from here we can configure devices if we had any already connected we're going to wait just a minute to actually connect our access points so we're going to skip that for now and it's asking us to preconfig our Wi-Fi network so let's go ahead and take a look see what we want to name it let's just say toasty D WiFi and we'll just put it as uh p w r d234 for the password so password 1234 will be our login information for toasty Wi-Fi once we get the access points added so let's go ahead click next and here we can actually set up our controller login so what do we want our main administrator name to be I'll just keep it as admin email is optional so I'm not going to fill that out and we'll go ahead and give this the same password as our Wi-Fi I do not recommend you actually do this please make sure you put a strong password on your actual controller and also it would be great if it is a different password than your wireless password now below we have device account now this is used by the controller to log in any access points or whatever you want to add to it now if you are setting up devices from scratch this really doesn't matter uh too much because it'll just use the default which is admin and admin if we set both of these to admin it will try to adopt any new access points we try to add to the controller with these credentials now if you already have omata access points or omata devices set up and you set custom uh logins so say this network is already being managed by controller much like how mine is you probably have non-default device credentials so here you would put those in if you are wanting to adopt them to to this new controller right now I am not going to do that eventually we're actually going to migrate my software controller to this but that will be in another video so for now we're just going to hit next and we can link this to our TPL link um Cloud login I'm actually not going to do this we can just skip it um so we're going to turn off Cloud access and hit skip if you want to be able to manage this from the online TP Link omata portal go ahead and leave it on and put in your TPL Link account information but here we're taken to the summary screen so we can see we've named our controller hom ma we have the time zone set correctly the application scenario is home which again doesn't really matter it's going to preconfig a wireless network named toasty Wi-Fi with a password of password 1234 we're going to have a login um admin account this is what we're going to log in to this controller with that is admin and also password 1 2 3 4 and then we just kept admin admin as our device account info and we turned off Cloud access so let's go ahead and click done and that's going to push these configurations to our new controller now I will mention if uh you don't have a wireless network already set up or the phone app or any of that if you just browse to the IP that you found for this device in DHCP it'll take you through these exact same steps just in a web browser it just looks a little bit different but all of the information is going to be the same and you can still skip the cloud access and all of that kind of stuff but now it shows that our uh controller is on so let's go ahead and switch over to a PC to take a look at uh the actual controller and just real quick because I forgot what the IP of this one was on our uh app if we just back out of that controller settings you can see we have right here homom ma at 10883 106 so that is what we are going to browse to so let's go ahead and open up a web browser and we're going to go to https 10881 13106 and this is going to bring us to the login page for our controller so we set our login information to admin and password 1 2 3 4 with a capital P we'll go ahead and log in and now at this point we have our omata controller pretty much set up and ready to go so we're ready to start adding devices and we can see we have new controller software available uh we really should update this right now um but I'm going to go ahead and just add our access points in first and then we will take care of that update so let's go ahead and grab whatever access points or switches or whatever you have go ahead and connect them to the same network so we're just going to plug our access points into this switch right here so I just plug my three access points into this Poe switch this will power all my access points because they support that and these are actually the TP Link in wall access points not the circular ones but the behavior and all of that is exactly the same so now that they're connected we should be able to see them ready for adoption in our controller so on the left side if we go to devices then this is where we should see them start to pop in however I am not seeing them for some reason so what would seem to be the problem well let's go ahead and start troubleshooting so what do we need for these to show up well oh well there's one maybe maybe you just need a little time but if you don't see them uh you need to make sure that your access points one are on the same network as your controller which also means that they need to be able to get an address via DHCP again if they don't get that address they do fall back to a default which let's go ahead and see if we can't find that I do believe it's 1921 16812 but let's just verify I'm going to go ahead and agree to these cookies and we're going to go down to the settings menu and we did just see all three of them pop in there so just give it a minute it says the up time was 2 minutes so that's how long it took for it to come online and contact the controller I guess but let's go into the settings menu at the bottom left of the navigation bar and go down to controller settings I believe and down here at the bottom is the access configuration so right now we have 10.88 13106 as our IP address that's what it got via DHCP and I don't see the fallback IP um information and it's just because I'm apparently blind if we scroll back up it's the very first option here so we've got the controller name the time zone ntp and all that but here at the bottom you can see our network settings are set to DHCP and our fallback IP is actually 1 192168 do0 253 so if this controller was unable to grab an IP address from the existing DHCP server it would automatically configure itself with this 0.2 53 address and as long as whatever you're using to configure this has a network adapter connected to it within this network then you would be able to configure it for the first time so let's go back to our devices page and start adopting these access points so right here on the right side we have this little check mark that says adopt so let's just go ahead and click all three of them they should all be moving from the pending state to the adopting and if we give this a few minutes then they should show up uh we'll see if they automatically update or not well right now they move to the provisioning state which provisioning just means that the settings are being pushed to these access points so any access point that you adopt to this uh omata controller is going to get the global settings for this site and what I mean by that is in the bottom left if we look at settings we configured these Wireless uh networks well this one wireless network during our basic setup so this wireless network is automatically going to get pushed to any of these access points that we adopt and we can limit this or change this later but that is the default Behavior if you have wireless networks configured in your controller then the devices you adopt are going to get those now it's a little bit different for switches because obviously switches aren't going to broadcast wireless networks but switches would get the information that would come from like the Lan wired network configuration or the profiles for switch Port profiles so you can actually preconfig basically your entire network with no Hardware at all you can go through and configure the wired portion this would apply to the omata Gateway devices the routers you could configure the port profiles which would apply to switches and the wireless networks which will apply to access points and then basically you could drop this controller at a site or another house or whatever order your equipment completely separate plug it all in and as you adopt them they they will get these settings now let's go back to the devices Tab and we can see all three of ours show connected at this point so they are ready to go and let's just bring our uh phone back up here for a second and go to our Wi-Fi area and see if it shows up yep it does it shows up as toasty Wi-Fi if we tap on that then we can use our preconfigured password which was just password 1 2 34 and connect to it and now we're connected to our new wireless network on our new access points that is all we need to do to get this running with the hardware controller and our uh access points but there's a few other maintenance actions we're going to do while we're here and that one is going to be to upgrade the controller so we want our Hardware to be on the latest version of software most of the time so let's go ahead and update this and to do this we're going to go to the settings again so bottom left click on settings and this time we're going to go to the maintenance section and if we scroll down to the bottom we can see there's a few options for our Hardware controller we can reboot it we can factory reset it or we can check for an upgrade so let's go ahead check for upgrade and we can see that there is a new version available let's look at the details here um I guess that's just a change those are just change notes from the last one I'm not too worried about what those actually say but let's go ahead and click upgrade and it says that our internet connection is going to be lost for several minutes during the upgrade yep we're good with that uh we're not using these access points for our internet connection and we don't have an omada router so we're not actually going to lose internet connectivity we're just going to lose um connectivity for anything connected to these new access points which is right now just my phone all right and it took it about a minute and a half but now it is rebooting okay and here we are roughly 5 minutes later and that screen has gone away and we've got the Amada startup screen so do give that part a little bit of time um took a little longer than I thought it would but eventually it did uh do something and at this point it's saying that this is going to take three to four minutes again so this entire process if you uh our counting is probably going to take about 10 to 15 minutes and we are now back at the login screen so that did take about another 3 minutes so I'd say in total that was probably about 7 to eight minutes of waiting around for the update so let's go ahead and log back in with our admin and password 1 2 3 4 and just see how different this interface is which at first glance here looks really not much different at all so now we have our controller ready to go it is updated it's got its APS let's go ahead and go into our site which is called default that's just what it calls the first site that uh is created if we click on that we'll go into our site settings and let's go ahead and check the firmware version of our actual APS so usually when you're setting this up you're going to upgrade the firmware for your controller as well as as everything else in the network and you can enable auto updates for that but most of the time I just leave it uh manual anyways let's go to devices and since we updated the uh firmware for this controller our APS are going to reprovision and probably say that they're adopting again that's just kind of what they go through whenever there's a major change like a firmware update for the controller and here we go they're all three oh well they're in the configuring stage anyways one uh difference that I have noticed right away from upgrading this controller is if we go into the settings menu here under our site we no longer have the actual controller specific settings what we need to do to change uh settings which affect the controller itself is go up to our organization thing and go to Global so I believe that they have made this more along the lines of like a unified dream machine where you've got the device specific settings versus your actual like site configuration settings to do anything that affects the controller itself which would be the controller's IP the firmware updates and all that we need to go into the global view now and then go to settings and this is where we can see all of our controller specific uh settings which there's also looks like there's been a few added might have been rearranged something like that as well so like now system settings is where we saw our access config uh previously under controller and then we've got controller settings here for the name and fallback IP and all that anyways when you upgrade firmware I'm sure TPL link is much like ubiquity where they like to change the location of things and update how it looks uh hopefully they don't go too crazy with that but if we go back to maintenance our firmware update section is actually no longer here it's just the backup section so if we go to system settings this is now where our uh check for upgrade actually is so upgrading our access points to the latest version um it would appear they're already at the latest version um they might have updated as soon as we adopted them or they just came to me with the latest um firmware Edition anyway because usually what you would see if they were not up to date is a little arrow over here next to the reboot uh button it would be like an up arrow that you could check to upgrade the firmware to the latest but I did just check um the omata website these access points are running version 117 and it looks like actually if I drag this over here it looks like the latest firmware that I can even download from the omata site is 116 so do with that what you will I'm not sure why the absolute latest isn't available here unless I'm doing something wrong but the moral of that story is our access points are already up to date so we don't need to do anything now at this point we could just Coast everything is good to go we set up our three AIS points um maybe what you want to do is name these based on where they're at if you click on your device go to config then you can uh rename it from the MAC address of the device to like kitchen AP go ahead and apply that and go ahead and just rename all of them so kitchen living room basement for example this just at least gives you a name to associate with the access point so you know kind of where it is when you're looking at it in the controller and there's a whole lot of other options and configuration that we could do from this controller but this video is not uh focused around showing you everything we can do with this um I will be going through some of the additional setup in other videos which will be coming but for now this is how we get the controller off the ground what we did we just plugged it in we're powering it via Poe it's connected to our switch which all of our other devices are connected to and the way that we configured it for the first time was actually through Wi-Fi that already existed again if you don't already have that then you can just browse to the IP of uh the hardware controller whatever IP it got with DHCP anyways before I ramble on too much I'm just going to leave it there and as always happy networking

Channel: Toasty Answers

Views: 12,559

Keywords: Omada, TP-Link, SDN, Controller, Ethernet, Wireless, OC200, Business Networking, Home Networking, Networking, Routing, Firmware Upgrade, How-to, Tutorial, Setup, Omada Controller, Omada Configuration, Omada Management, Management

Id: 1hVisiJD1Vk

Length: 21min 24sec (1284 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 01 2024