This article is part two of my home wifi network upgrade. It comes in much later than I expected due to a massive interruption in my home life. Shortly after I wrote the prior article, my mother became ill. It didn’t seem like much at the time just a simple cold or flu bug. However, that turned out to not be the case. The short version of the long story is she passed away from pulmonary fibrosis which is a complication of rheumatoid arthritis and taking Methotrexate.
My mother lived with us, and so it has been a challenging time, but we live with a strong faith in Jesus and believe we’ll be reunited someday.
So with that out of the way I wanted to comment on two small things I ran into when working with the Ubiquiti equipment. The first as I was configuring the UniFi Security Gateway and Unifi AP AC LR unit I was struggling with getting an IP address for the access point. I had internet connectivity via the WAN port from my cable modem on WAN 1 of the USG. LAN 1 was plugged into a dumb switch, and I could browse the internet from hardwired machines with no issue, but no matter what I tried I couldn’t get an IP address for the access point which was plugged into WAN 2/LAN 2 of the USG. I was expecting it to pick up a DHCP address like the hardwired machines.
I spent about an hour fiddling with it trying to make it work. Finally, I resorted to looking at the quick start guide, and there in tiny little print, I had missed the notation that said LAN 1 defaults to DHCP on but nothing about LAN 2. I moved the AP connection to a port on the switch and low and behold it quickly grabbed an IP. So just keep that in mind when you’re first configuring the USG, there is no DHCP out of the box on LAN 2.
The second small issue I ran into was with the Unifi Network Controller software. I did not catch that to use the software effectively it always needs to be running. So I first deployed it on a Windows 10 VM that runs on my laptop via VMware Fusion. This machine isn’t running all the time, and I realized right away that was a problem. So it was a matter of switching over to my homelab and finding a suitable Windows machine to install the software. It’s running happily on a Windows 2013 server that used to run VMware Update Manager but was decommissioned with the move to vSphere 6.5.
Since then I have added a second wireless access point to provide better coverage of the second floor of the house, and things are running very smoothly. I’m pleased with the setup.