Initial conclusion with multiple Unifi AP's

I just thought I’d give back some info, instead of always asking for advice and information!

So my “stage 1” wifi is done at last…many months of saving and finding time.

Originally I just had wifi in the house, the freebee one that came with the internet connection. It was ok, not too reliable or strong. I then started using a shed at the back of my garden more and the wifi didn’t reach.

To start with I tried one of those wifi extenders…but the speed was in the range of kilobytes and not megabytes! :laughing:

Then I found a cheap TP link AP and threw even cheaper Cat6 down to the end of the garden. It worked ok, but it was annoying to re-connect between separate wifi AP’s whenever I went from house and back of garden, especially during a data intensive stuff.

I looked into mesh systems, didn’t fancy one AP jumping to another, so found Unifi (admit via Lawrence Systems). I bought one, seemed pretty good, then another and then finally (many months later) a 3rd and now have the internet connection I was hoping for.

I have the unifi controller running in a jail on my TrueNAS, which is less than ideal as it’s still in semi-trial mode. BUT, I have bought a Raspberry Pi, successfully loaded Rasbian and Unifi on there and all is well. Just need to switch everything over to it.

If you’re interested in a visual, here’s a little thing I made, just in case it helps.

Thanks again everyone that’s generally helped me with tech things, it’s not my area of expertise and you’ve all helped me greatly :+1: :clap:

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Glad to hear you’re having success! Good stuff, getting the unifi controller on the raspberry pi.

A word of warning: if you don’t have a high endurance SD card for the pi, get one. The controller does a lot of writes and it’ll burn out the card. Even better would be to boot the pi off a USB ssd.

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Even better would be to boot the Pi off an iscsi LUN from the NAS…

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Thank you, I’m sure in part thanks to you! :clap: The Pi is an incredible little thing, even tried the GUI OS, very impressed with the performance from such a tiny thing.

Cheers for the headsup, I had read about that so bought a few of these :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:

When I first played around with it, it was reliable, despite have a questionable SDCard in it. I’m a bit lazy, when my phone SDCard runs out of space, I archive it and buy another. I still wonder if it’s the best thing to do - files are sync’d with cloud, etc., :thinking:

I did seriously think about doing what you say with a USB SSD, I’m definitely going to keep that in mind the second I have an issue. :+1:

That sounds like a fantastic idea…unfortunately I’m unfamiliar with most of the words you wrote :laughing: Sounds like I’d need the NAS up and powered though? Not sure if that’s do’able just yet, but I like the idea! :+1:

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What happens if the network goes down because switches can’t access the controller to get their config and your NAS’ LUN is trunked to a VLAN that no longer exists?

Awesome!

I would recommend taking occasional backups from the controller UI and just storing them somewhere safe, because if the SD goes bad, you might not be able to read it like you can an SSD that’s overcooked.

As far as your Phone SD card, I don’t really have any suggestions because I don’t use my phone for much more than SMS (replacements) and voice calls. It’s more of a traditional phone than anything else.

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Cheers for that - I haven’t tried it yet, but I’ve seen that there’s an Pi SD imager available, so I thought I’d give that a shot - then in theory I can re-load it on a fresh and less broke SD Card…we’ll see!

I do differ from you, though I like your style more! Unfortunately as part of my job I take a lot of photos / videos of buildings, normally between 300-2000MB per job (around 2 jobs a week). It’s part of the reason I got interested in TrueNAS, amazing stuff if setup right.

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That’s definitely an option, but the imager will just copy all X gb of data, so you’ve got to be careful of file size. I think the best solution would be to go into the unifi controller UI like this:

The Unifi APs/switches do not require a constant link to the controller to ‘keep working’ … the controller pushes new config changes when needed
If the network goes down and the Pi can’t access the NAS remote drive, the root mount on the pi will go read only, so everything will keep working but no writes to the disk will ahppen, and eventually the pi will kernel panic.
Same as when the SD goes bad, with the difference that when you restore the network connection to the NAS and reboot, your data will be there.
Also, with truenas you can take snapshots of the LUN and have backups if needed

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How so, a controller is only required for various metrics and reconfiguration, and NAS machines tend to be fairly reliable.

What makes it worse than a raspberry pi?

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Yes, that would assume your NAS is always powered on (same goes for your network switch).
In that case, you could boot this image (BerryBoot v2.0 - bootloader / universal operating system installer [BerryTerminal]) off the pi SD card (boot only, read only, no strain on the SD card) and then configure the PI hard drive on your NAS by following a tutorial like this:
https://xpertstec.com/how-to-configure-iscsi-share-in-truenas-core/
That way your data would sit on the NAS, not on the PI, and even a corrupted SD card would only require reinstalling berryboot and repointing it to your NAS …
I agree, if you’re powering off your NAS when not in use then it doesn’t make any sense.
What would make sense if you are already running truenas would be to update to Core (linux based) and run the unifi controller in a native docker container … no real need for the Pi if the only thing you run on it is the unifi controller …

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Sorry, that was poorly written, I meant that the TrueNAS instance is still in testing and not in full time use yet. For this reason, it’s not always turned on as I’m still feeling my way around how it’ll be used. The Unifi instance [on TrueNAS] has worked flawlessly, the only minor issue is that the update speed is much slower and while I can successfully force update with other jails (Plex for example) using someone’s clever code/instructions, I haven’t seen the same for Unifi. Also of course, TrueNAS very sensibly only releases updates when they’re 100% happy with reliability.

I’m sure once I’ve finished setting it up, it will likely be on all the time. I just need to find a better physical home for the server. A good thing is that the PoE switch I have is also covered by the UPS (that’s plugged into TrueNAS, both USB and power).

That’s fantastic about having a read only SD Card :+1:

Sorry, when you said Core, did you mean Scale? I thought that was the container friendly version? I have installed TrueNAS Scale on a spare physical machine, it’s fantastic and I’m half tempted to wait until Stable Release before I do the final setup. That does mean re-testing though.

You’re right there’s no reason for the Pi, I only got it because the TrueNAS box isn’t always turned on…plus it’s quite power hungry, so I only want it on full time when there’s a near constant use of it.

Thank you for teaching me all this, really kind :+1:

Yep, brain fart :slight_smile:

That is a completely different can of worms (the power draw of always on electronics at home). In the years I have always tried to keep that to a minimum, but lately the situation got kind of out of hand. Being stuck at home for a couple years now because of COVID didn’t help.
My Truenas are running on HP Microserver Gen8s , pretty old hardware, but 8 Xeon threads, 1 LSI 8 port controller, 2 10TB hard drives and 4 SSDs draw about 50W at idle, 65 when transcoding 1080p in plex (not really powerful enough to transcode 4k) …

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I have them too :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:

Yeah, Covid certainly did change things - I was lucky that I rented an office and electric was unlimited…now I’m home though, I’m trying to be a bit more careful.

Wow, your server is really low on power, way better than mine :frowning: Mine has an idle 130 Watts, and when 4 HDD’s wake up it can be 180…although I need to double check this as other things are plugged into the same plug monitor. I’m re-using an old workstation of mine, E5-1650v4 on an X99-E WS Motherboard with 64GB RAM, 9 HDD’s and 2x SSD’s (boot). Also an NVMe for jails/plugins. Mine does CPU transcoding, but not much as 99% of the time it’s playing locally.

You have a workstation part, almost double the cpu power than mine for more than double the wattage …

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I have one with Core, the other with Scale, backing each other up … pool imported well, had to re-create my shares, I had a BHYVE vm (pfsense) that I just restarted with KVM and worked … go figure. Haven’t moved the Raspberry ISCSI LUNs and the docker setup yet, but I’m waiting for a weekend where I’m bored to spice things up :slight_smile:

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Ahhh, I guess that makes sense :slight_smile: It’s a shame I have nothing useful that can make use of it. Oddly enough I built a snap shot machine for my TrueNAS instance (i3-9100 on Supermicro board), it’s so low power when compared and I wondered a few times about using that instead as a primary. Thing is, I might want to tinker and create jails to do things, not too sure yet, but at least in theory I’d have some power.

I turned off 4 cores once and made it a 2C/4T machine, didn’t make a worthwhile difference to power usage, I guess it’s the board and the generation age.

I guess also the CPU / board does have Overclocking abilities (the CPU is restricted), may be I can lower the clockspeed…hmm.

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That’s good and reassuring to hear :+1: Think I might try again with pfsense some time, seemed superb.

Haha, spicing things up, hope it doesn’t suck up too much of your time!

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@ChrisA, could you go into more detail as to why you didn’t like mesh systems. It sounds like a mesh system would be perfect for my use case. I should go into more detail about my use case. My wife has quit smoking. Now, she is kicking me outside every time I light a cigar. The problem is the Internet coverage outside. We don’t have any 5g coverage where we live, so I am stuck with the cheap AP provided by our internet provider, and my tablet keeps dropping from the AP every time I try and use it outside. I thought of putting an Unifi Ap under the porch roof, but since I would have to use a wire to connect it to our router, that idea is out. My wife wouldn’t prove the exposed wire on the kitchen ceiling, the hole in the kitchen wall so I could reach the dining room where all our network equipment is kept. Does anyone have any ideas?