Working with Ubiquiti wireless devices

Because of some other activities, been working with Ubiquiti (http://www.ubnt.com/) wireless devices.

Ubiquiti has an interestingly large range of devices. Would not pretend to understand them all just yet. If not an Advanced Degree(tm), you need advanced training and experience.

Had a heck of a time getting some things going. According to their documentation, you mostly just plug-n-play...or not.

Apparently it takes an Advanced Degree(tm) to figure this out.

The first problem is that the wireless connections are excruciatingly slow to operate. Spent hours wondering what the heck was going on. Finally I decided to attach to the wire--THAT works as you expect, and its properly fast. Problem is, that GUI doesn't quite do everything. There's no control for PoE.

The issues begin with the "airCube". The documentation says you can direct connect a PoE radio device to the PoE output on the Cube and power the radio device. Turns out this is not quite true--not at first--despite the documentation saying you can, incl the pictures.

AirCube appears to have PoE turned off by default, out of the box. You want to use it? Not so easy to do. Out of five units, they were inconsistent about PoE being on. Not sure what that means.

In addition, the AirCube does NOT respond to casual broadcast pings. I.e., if you try "ping X.X.X.255" it doesn't answer. If you try specific IPs (like X.X.X.22) it will if you hit the right one...?

How to do it: You need to use UNMS, or you need to use the your phone. In those GUIs, you can get to the control to turn on PoE. You can get to a management web-page on the device if you connect via the wire, but you CANNOT turn PoE on this way (post-firmware-update: that might have changed).

Or you need to guess the IP. Could get this via "nmap" (unix thing). Even so, changing PoE isn't on the service webpage.

Or maybe you run Wireshark and it tells you. Wireshark will pick up all traffic on the wire it's on, and show you all active IPs. A fully passive IP wouldn't be seen until it does something specific.

On top of all this, I don't think the units are consistent about what they are doing.

Once you have the device detected in UNMS, you can get it to do the firmware upgrade, that puts some new controls in front of you, one of which will be "turn on PoE". I did not, at this point, go look at the direct web-page to find a PoE button.

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The NanoBeams are far simpler to get going, they do the obvious thing with a known-in-advance IP address (.1.20). Wire straight to them, set to DHCP, reboot, they are on your regular network, can then config via webpage (altho you still have to track down the dhcp ip addr).

Will be back to this in a few days, make it more coherent, etc.

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And apparently if you use 'ssh' to get into the device, there are still more settings you can work with. They run a micro-linux. Amazing.