Unifi users - how often do you find yourself needing to restart APs?

[Alex Hillman]

Hey gang!

I'm especially curious if other Unifi users find themselves needing to reboot access points from time to time. It seems like a few of ours tend to get used more, and over time...they seem to slow down. 

A quick restart from the Unifi console gets them back to their snappy usual selves, but I'm wondering if we can address the problem somewhere else in the admin console? I've been experimenting with load balancing within wlan groups but I can't tell if it's helping or not :)

Configuration tips welcome!

-Alex

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[Jacob Sayles]

I'm seeing something similar, although I don't have enough data to really offer much to the conversation.  I know one of our APs keeps dropping down to 100Mbps so I think it has a bad cable.  I also see a fair amount of channel switching going on.  I've left things on auto hoping it will figure out the best settings, but I might need to pin them down.  

Jacob

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[Jacques Paquin]

Not something we've seen yet since we're new but it's certainly something I'll keep an eye out for now that you've mentioned it.

What's you typical load per AP? Or the APs that seem to slow down?

[Alex Hillman]

It seems to be less about the number of devices currently connected (can be anywhere between 20 and 50 on a normal day) and how many devices have been connected in recent days/weeks. I can't prove that to be 100% true, that's my instinct. 

-Alex

On Sunday, April 26, 2015, Jacques Paquin <jpa...@landsman.com> wrote:

Not something we've seen yet since we're new but it's certainly something I'll keep an eye out for now that you've mentioned it.

What's you typical load per AP? Or the APs that seem to slow down?

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[Aaron Schaap]

We've been using Unifi for awhile now and started having the same issues after a few months of usage. I did a lot of the load balancing stuff, along with a lot of Channel/Band configuration to deal with problems. We had the same issues of needing to reboot and it didn't matter if it was 60+ people or only 10. I tried to see if it was a time of day and that didn't seem to matter. I thought it was a POE issue for a bit but after playing with different things, it didn't seem to be the case.

We actually just switched everything to Meraki (https://meraki.cisco.com/). I manage our infrastructure but also chat quite a bit with the building owner that offers WIFI to the rest of the building (4 floors). They had Unifi as well and were noticing the same things. The verdict is still out - on day 2 right now but I like the additional reporting within Meraki.

I also like how Meraki handles wireless band selection (2.4GHz vs 5GHz) much better as well. Unifi is supposed to do this but doesn't do it well. We noticed a lot of users (mostly Mac) could connect to 5GHz but got stuck at 2.4GHz often. I ended up broadcasting only 5GHz and created another SSID for 2.4GHz for the few users still needing that. Wasn't ideal but everyone had a much better experience. Meraki does "Band Steering" much better by detecting clients capable of 5GHz operation and steers them to that frequency, while leaving 2.4GHz available for legacy clients.

I'd be curious if you figure it out but we decided to switch to Meraki ourselves.

------------------------------
Aaron Schaap
The Factory - www.workthefactory.com
@schaapy and @coFactory

[Alex Hillman]

Interesting - we did a trial with Meraki and for us, the broadcast range was terrible in our building.

I found some tools that work with the Unifi API to detect issues and can even trigger an access point reboot, I'm considering an experiment to cycle access points regularly to keep them "fresh" and see if that helps. 

-Alex 

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[Jonathan Markwell]

Those tools look great. Thanks for sharing Alex!

Our APs get rebooted about once per month. It's difficult to tell if they actually needed it, it's the first thing members will do when they experience any connectivity problems.

We have between 60 and 100 devices per day across 5 access points, two of which can only get an uplink at 100Mbit due to old wiring. We've left the configuration to defaults, they adjust their own power levels and channels as the environment changes.

I'm of the opinion that the easiest way to improve WiFi is simply to buy more access points (provided they are smart enough to keep their power levels low and can roam users to their nearest AP). I've already spent too much of my life trying and failing to optimise WiFi configurations. :)

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[Jacques Paquin]

We've only just started so I'm keeping my eyes open for this problem. Those tools look promising. Is there a stand-alone utility to reboot an AP? Or do you need to code something up in Python?

-jacques

[Alex Hillman]

If you're running the management software (which you really should - even though it's not "require" it handles SO much automatically), you can browse to an access point and restart it with a single click. 

See this screenshot: http://dangerouslyawesome.com/snaps/indyhalljukebox.at.indyhall.org_-_UniFi_2015-04-29_14-59-42.jpg

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The #1 mistake in community building is doing it by yourself.

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On Wed, Apr 29, 2015 at 2:57 PM, Jacques Paquin <jpa...@landsman.com> wrote:

We've only just started so I'm keeping my eyes open for this problem. Those tools look promising. Is there a stand-alone utility to reboot an AP? Or do you need to code something up in Python?

-jacques

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[Jacques Paquin]

I am running the management software and I have played with all those options. But if this was a concern in the future, or just for cruft cleanup, I might put them on a once a month reboot schedule. And much like everything else at this point in my life, if I don't set up a recurring task to just DO IT, I tend to forget :)

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[Craig Plunkett]

A few years ago, when I built an outdoor public network,  we had to put an appliance timer in to power cycle a Ubiquiti AP for a minute at 3AM every day.  :)  It was on a roof at the far end of a point to point link.  In the rest of the network, we used IP enabled power switches that we could do on-demand reboots with.

This kind of thing has been a problem with Ubiquiti equipment for years.  It is a great value, but requires care and feeding.

When and why did you switch from Ruckus?

Craig

[Alex Hillman]

"When and why did you switch from Ruckus?"

It's been about 6 months. We had the same problems and worse with Ruckus. Unifi has been 100x better for us, and I'm feeling more confident in this thread that if we auto-reboot our APs overnight on a schedule the remaining problems will be gone. 

I'll report back when we do!

-Alex

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