Hey Cats,
EnGenius - have people used their hardware? Good? Bad? Ugly?
They have a solid looking outdoor AP - @felixthecat and I need one for a Canadian install which means the unit needs to be solid and withstand harsh winters.
If you’ve used their hardware, how do you like the configuraiton interface? We’ll want to run 2+ SSIDs and multiple VLANs. We would use their indoor APs too.
TIA!
My feedback is stay far far far away.
I found a bug in their configuration setup where you can enter a password longer than the device will store, causing it to truncate and save the password without notifying you. This means that when you go to log in next time you put in the full password you thought you set and it wont let you in.
I opened a ticket in March of 2021, my first response from tech support was May 18th 2022 more than a year later. They simply closed the ticket, no update on the bug, no help, nothing.
Secondly their controller software is MIPS based and cannot be hosted on anything other than closed Hypervizors, so either you buy their hardware controller knowing that MIPS has no memory protection and is constantly getting security vulnerabilities reported or you buy ESXi/HyperV/VMWare Player. The other option is to use an AWS instance…
Now you can run the AP’s standalone BUT there is a huge problem with running without a controller, no clean handoff with wifi devices. I have 3 AP’s and if I start watching a video in my office, and walk to the master bedroom on the other side of the house, I have to manually disconnect from my wifi and turn it back on to get it to hop to the closest AP.
I would have to run an authentication server as well as their ezMaster software to enable devices to cleanly hop from one AP to another without buffering or connection loss.
This can be tuned a bit by kicking devices off an AP based on their signal strength but if your doing a video/voice call or watching a video you will almost always get disconnected or at least buffer.
So, in summery I greatly regret investing in my EnGenius AP’s I have 3x EWS357AP’s that have never worked as intended, and I have gotten 0 support from the MFG.
Here’s a quick Update on the following EnGenius APs @Bumperdoo and I decided on:
Initial Setup and configuration was smooth and without any Hiccups.
In contrast to the FS APs we were working with before, configuring the Management VLAN and per-VLAN SSIDs was a matter of minutes and well-documented in the Manuals.
Same goes for any other needed configuration.
Clients hop between APs based on signal strength just fine, which is expected behavior for this kind of setup. We decided to configure the APs Standalone because the features of the controller software weren’t needed.