Unifi AP - First Time Setup

[Music] hey what's going on everybody today I'm gonna show you how to set up a unify access point from ubiquity this is just gonna be a step by step guide because these things can be a little bit different than your regular Wi-Fi access points or Wi-Fi routers that you would find at the store and that is because they are managed using what's called a controller software instead of just logging in to the device itself so most of us are used to just going to the IP of our home router logging in with username and password and being able to manage our Wi-Fi network these things were made for businesses or enterprises that have a lot of access points so basically the actual thing you buy is just a dumb access point you have to configure it using separate software that's hosted on another machine be it a server or your desktop or whatever so that's what I'm gonna show you how to do today just enough to get you off the ground and kind of a step by step how to install the controller software and then set up your first Wi-Fi network it really is simple it's just a little bit different than what you might be used to or what you might expect so the first thing you want to do is when you take it out of the box after you've verified that everything you bought is actually in the box you're gonna want to find this little brick thing hopefully it came with yours this is a POA injector or power over ethernet injector so these things are not actually powered by a wall wart or any kind of power cable at all they're powered over the actual cat5 cable that you connect to it and that's what this thing does you can see that there's two ports one labeled LAN the other labeled p OE so you're gonna connect your land port into your router for this I'm using an edge router X as my example so just one of the free ports there and you're going to connect the PIO east side actually into your access point and if your access point has a main and a secondary port connected to the main if you have one with two ports the secondary port is actually a port that will carry the p OE downstream to another access point if you want to chain these on each other so once that's plugged in to your network just wait a minute for it to get address once it's ready the light on the top which should be white right now flashing it'll be a solid white once it's got its IP address from your already functioning DHCP server and ready to be discovered by the software so the access point that I'm using in this video is actually just a ubiquity AP Pro it's one of the older models that doesn't support AC but it's just one that I had laying around now you'll have to reference your ApS documentation to see if it actually supports 24 volt passive p OE 48 volt passive p OE or actual standard p OE that can be created by a switch if the access point requires p OE though it should come with the p OE injector unless you bought it as a part of a set that explicitly said it does not include this injector if yours didn't come with an injector you need to make sure you buy the right one in order to power it or have a switch that's capable of producing whatever power it takes and that's gonna vary depending on which model you actually have this specific one takes 48 volt passive now once your ap is plugged in and ready to go the light is solid just head over to UI comm unify comm and go to the download section now from here you're gonna select whatever model of access point that you have so first go to unify and then browse down here for your specific models so for me I have the AP Pro which I don't actually see specifically in this list so let's just go to unify AP and yet here it is you ap pro right underneath there so it's a kind of a sub model of the actual unify AP and in this download list you're gonna have firmware software and documentation now you should have the documentation in the box with your AP but if not you can download the Quick Start Guide that's the best way to go so if we just go here download this then we have our electronic user guide here and mostly this is probably going to go through like mounting instructions connecting it most of your questions should be answered in this guide although I know sometimes it can be a little bit confusing but at some point it should tell you to install the software now this is not an English I'm not sure which one I clicked on so let's go to the QuickStart guide for this one English there we go so we got mounting instructions a whole lot of mounting instructions and eventually you'll get down to the point where it wants you to install the software so says download it install the latest version of the unified controller software so this is what's special about these access points you have to use this software in order to configure it because you can't log in to the device itself so go into this link which is UI comm slash download slash unify this gives you all of the downloads of the software as well as some QuickStart guides so it looks like actually I don't know what model were under but here in the software section which was actually here as well you don't have to go through the QuickStart guide in order to get that link it's right here in the software section but you'll just download unify network controller for Windows if you're on a Windows and Mac if you're on Mac Linux if you're on Linux then we'll just go ahead and click download and accept and download the file it's going to download unify installer exe save that and then go ahead and open it and install it now you might notice here in the list there's a there's one for Debian Ubuntu and unify cloud key actually there's two versions for that and unify cloud key so this unify cloud key is a separate piece of hardware that you can buy which is kind of resemblance of a Raspberry Pi and what that is is a separate piece of hardware that runs this controller software for you 24/7 so you don't have to just install this controller software on your windows or whatever PC if you want to take advantage of some of the advanced features that it has you're gonna want to run a controller 24/7 and for that you're gonna have to install it on something else unless you're just gonna run your PC 24/7 that is for me I hosted in a virtual machine on a server but the quickest way is to just download it for your PC can figure it up and then forget about it so the only downside is that if you want to make some changes later you have to either redownload the controller software or reopen it to actually make your changes so let's go ahead and install the unified controller here so it asked me if I want to upgrade sure it shouldn't ask you if you want to upgrade I've already installed this before I just moved it for some reason it thinks it's still installed so hopefully this video goes good since it was supposed to remove all the settings but obviously it didn't all right we're gonna leave start unified controller after installation checked and hit finish and it's gonna initialize the controller go through all these steps and it should get a green checkmark here in a second and then we'll be able to click this launch a browser to manage the network button alright it's done so let's launch the browser it's gonna give you a certificate error that's fine just go to advanced proceed to localhost and here it's gonna ask you to name your controller so you can name it pretty much anything you want we're just gonna do test controller and you can also restore setup from a backup if you have one we don't let's go to next now here wants you to sign in with your bik WA T accounts so if you have a ubiquity account and you want to use the online features like the cloud access manager you just log in with those credentials here and it's gonna tie this controller with your ubiquity account or if you don't feel like doing that you can go to advanced setup and you can uncheck use your ubiquity account for local access and you can come up with your own username and password which is what I'm gonna do here so local administrator username we're just gonna do test and the password 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 and then an email test at test net now let's just hit next okay so what's wanting us to sign it with ubiquity account again so let's go back here and uncheck enable remote access so we have to turn that off or else it wants us to still log in with our big-booty accounts who have that cloud access here we go so automatically optimize the network we're just gonna leave that checked as well as auto backup hit next and now it wants to name the Wi-Fi so this is gonna be the SSID of your actual Wi-Fi network so let's name it test underscore Wi-Fi Wi-Fi password again 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 and then this little thing right here asks if you want to combine the 2 gigahertz and 5 gigahertz Wi-Fi network names into one so if this is on you're only gonna see one SSID so when we bring this up on our phone we're gonna see test Wi-Fi we'll be able to connect with a password of 1 through 8 and that's it we don't have a different between two gigahertz or five gigahertz it just connects to whichever one is preferable to that device now if you want it to where there's actually two separate networks it'll be test Wi-Fi 2 gigahertz and test Wi-Fi 5 gigahertz personally I like to turn that on so we'll leave that on and hit next and now here is the device setup now as long as your access point got an IP address on the same network as this controller using your dhcp server you should show up here if it doesn't you're gonna want to hold down the reset button on your access point which is should be on the back in between the ports if you have two of them just hold that down for a little bit reset it to factory let it grab another IP address and it'll show up here if it still doesn't show up here then there's gonna be a little more troubleshooting you want to make sure that you actually have an IP address on your access point and if you're using an edge router I'll show you how to verify that real fast so if you're using an edge router just head to your DHCP section go to the DHCP server for that specific local area network that you've plugged your access point into which you probably only have one and then just scroll through until you see the host name something either that you don't recognize or something this is unify so it looks like it's not showing up here but I see two that I don't recognize a one ninety six and one two nine and if we open up our controller tab again we can see that the pro is the one two nine so this one that I didn't recognize this is actually the controller and you can bring this up beforehand and make sure that you can kind of see what new pops up once you plug your access point in if you don't see anything pop up then it didn't get an IP address and yeah you'll have to troubleshoot further but anyways we're gonna check the access point once it's been discovered there hit next and this is gonna review the configuration with you so your controller name is test controller remote access is disabled you can leave that on if you have a ubiquity account you want to sign in with it use ubiquity account for local access no we've created our own username and password the local administrator username is test the Wi-Fi name is test underscore Wi-Fi and then we can set our timezone and area so sure Chicago timezone that's what I'm in now let's hit finish now at this point is going to push the configurations to your access points and if we go over here on the left or just right here two access points or devices click on that it's going to show all of the devices you have connected to this controller which should be one so this is the one we're trying to set up right now and it says adopting update required so let's go ahead and click on this and it says a firmware updates available that includes key updates improving device and it's automatically updating so right now the controller is communicating with the access point it's pushing all the updates that it needs and then it's going to push the configurations that we just made for the SSID of test Wi-Fi and all the user names and all that now once it pushes all of this to the access point that access point is now tied to this controller if you install the controller software on a different PC from scratch you will not be able to just directly manage this access point once it's adopted to this version of the controller it is tied to it if you spin up a new instance of controller software you're gonna have to I believe it's just called unadopted like that you have to basically blow out the configuration of this one RIA dops the access point to the new controller software and reconfigure it from scratch now if you took a backup of whatever controller software you used to configure it which I believe you can do in one of these menus here and backup restore so you can download the backup file here so download the backup for the last seven days you can set this to whatever time period really you want and you can download the file and this is going to be the file that you'll upload if you were to install a new instance of this controller software that's gonna go into some of the other menus at this point all the configuration we've done is enough to get you off the ground so as long as your network has been functioning before you put this in at this point once it's provisioning you will be able to connect to it and access the internet so what I'm going to show you at this point is just kind of a little bit extra that you might want to do with it let's see clients tab this is where you'll show clients that are connected if there were any yet insights again clients and insights about those clients you can put these devices on a map kind of create one if you have multiples statistics once it comes up it'll show some statistics but one of the main things is this wireless network so here this is under settings wireless networks you can see we have test Wi-Fi it's security and you can edit your wireless network here this is where all of your configuration is going to be done if you want to change it so under the Advanced Options we can use a VLAN tag if we want for this wireless network if you have multiple SSIDs you can have more than one on this single device so you could have test Wi-Fi one two three or four and you could use VLAN tags to separate them if you have a router and the configuration for VLANs you can hide your SSID this fast roaming is a it's supposed to make it to where whenever your device gets away from one access point in near another one it automatically switches without any interruption however you can see it is beta from experience leaving this off works I think just as well because these access points actually have another kind of feature standard where your phone or whatever you're using will connect to the nearest access point automatically so if you have multiple access points with the same SSID you should be able to automatically roam between them without much interruption at all and then there's other advanced features mac filter if you want to filter based on MAC address and either a whitelist or a blacklist I use this for my internet or things network and you got radius which you'll probably never use at home and then here you've got your your channel control let's see what else we got networks this is just kind of your configuration for your home network that's wired into so for this it says our subnet is 192 168 don't 1.0 which is actually incorrect I'm gonna go ahead and edit this this shouldn't matter actually I'm gonna leave it like that so I can show you that it doesn't matter just in case you think you need to change this you don't and then the rest of these other menus are just you can poke through or look up on your own time I'm not gonna go through all the menus here the actual unified controller software was meant to control a lot of devices including the unified switches and the security gateways so this software can do a lot of stuff and it's made to be the single point of management for all of these unify line of devices but at this point we should be good so yeah here it says it's a it's got the green or not wow I don't even know my colors the blue light on it which means that it's good to go and you should see a colored light on your access point if you don't there is a setting for that yeah so here under set that settings config in general you can set the led to on/off or use the site settings which if you use site settings it's going to take the configuration from the site which is done under that settings menu I just showed you so don't worry about that for now but I just changed it to have the LED on just in case but at this point your access point should be ready to go as you can see it's provisioning again because I made that one change for the LED so it's gonna push that change the access point and then it'll come back up operational and then we'll connect to it and here we go it's operational so if we go to our Wi-Fi settings on our phone and we let it look for our networks we can see that we have test underscore Wi-Fi we're gonna connect to that with the password one two three four five six seven eight join that there we go we are now connected to test Wi-Fi so let's go to the internet and Google mall in Austin Texas apparently and there we go we are on the internet and this is working just like regular wireless access point should so we are good at this point and if you want to you can click on the device now the newer versions of this software gives you a Wi-Fi experience that's kind of like a ballpark of how good or bad your Wi-Fi signal is or how well it's performing but if we go to statistics and now we probably need to give it a little bit before we look at that clients you can see butter that's the phone I just connected on you got the IP of it you can click on it kind of see some history and other random details insights should also show it we got the client name butter manufacturer Apple is it a user or a guest so you can set up guest networks on this thing right now it's connected as a regular user to the regular wireless network and you can kind of get some statistics on how much data has been up and down what time it was first seen what not so you get a lot of functionality in this controller now in order to actually use all of this statistical data so like the insights and the clients and the histories and all that that requires you having the controller running 24/7 because your access point is going to be communicating these stats back to the controller so you have to have a controller running at all times in order for you to actually get all that information it is not required to have a controller running all the time like I've already said I've kind of just been rambling on for the past few minutes if you were just here to get your Wireless off the ground and working we are well past that point that was done after we hit finish on the web UI and the access point started provisioning that was actually the last step to just getting this thing off the ground all of this is just kind of extra and that being said this is the end of the video because I don't really have anything else I want to talk about let me know if you have an idea for a video or you want to see more of this or you want me to go more in depth on something just let me know down in the comments and I will do my best to make that video this one was actually a request by oh I cannot remember who it was but I'll put a put him down in the description below probably wouldn't have made this video if he didn't suggest it so I'm trying to look at all your suggestions and kind of take those into account and see if I can't make a video about it while I can I've been very busy lately so it's one of the reasons you haven't seen really any videos from me and forever but hopefully you'll learn something with this one apologize for rambling too much thanks for watching and fun networking you

Channel: Toasty Answers

Views: 590,438

Rating: 4.8098345 out of 5

Keywords: Unifi, Wifi, Access Point, AP, AP-PRO, AP-AC, Networking, Home Networking, Configuration, Ubiquiti, Internet, Tutorial

Id: jwa2FN44rFk

Length: 20min 5sec (1205 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 07 2019