[TriLUG] Mesh WiFi

[Matt Flyer via TriLUG]

Wes,

Actually, you raised a good question, and the answer is that there is a
high probability that there's things about mesh wifi that I don't
understand. As a preamble, the whole setup was fairly new to me and I
was trying to 'future proof' things as much as I could. Pretty much
every room in the house has at least one home run of Cat 6 to the IT
closest, but two years from the install they aren't even terminated. 

My initial I found that I could configure both AP's to use one SSID. It
seemed to work, and didn't seem to cause any problems. I am not sure if
this is the proper practice or not. A large part of what I was doing
was experimenting and learning. In the end, I set the devices to talk
between themselves on 5GHz and most of the devices automatically choose
to connect to the APs on 2.4 GHz.

Being out in the sticks, the house is limited to either Satellite or
Verizon (hot spot) * - more on this in a second, so part of my thinking
is that having intra-house networking that was blazing fast is still
only going to be as poor as the upstream connection. Regardless, it
would be trivial in terms of programming to change back to two wired
connections from the AP to the switch.

As far as the access points, and coverage, it was partially a guess and
partially driven by aesthetics. There is a ceiling mounted AP in both
hallway ends of the house (kitchen / living room in the center, master
bed / bath on one end and guests and tv room on the other). It covers
the whole area comfortably and is mostly out of site.

I also set up a wireless bridge between my wife's shop and the house.
Tests on that showed that it would push 300 MB/s with the semi crude
alignment we did by getting the signal indicator lights all lit and
then going into the tool to try to tweak it, and more effort could
probably improve it. Again, it ties to the house Internet.

My plan was to put every 'zone', e.g. wired, wireless, shop, modem lan,
etc all in their own VLAN and put up firewall rules as desired so that
things like 'guest' wifi can't access the security cameras or printers,
etc, but for now it's still pretty well wide open.

A note on the satellite Internet. The house is a good ways from the
main road, but the shop buiding is a lot closer. DSL is available and
the neighbor has it with good results. I am thinking of getting DSL run
to the shop and then reversing the wireless bridge to bring data to the
house. The DSL isn't great, but it's sufficient to watch Netflix or
Prime and doesn't data cap out after watching a movie.
 

On Tue, 2020-10-27 at 11:03 -0400, Wes Garrison via TriLUG wrote:
> What I meant is, Matt Flyer specifically said that he had cat 6 runs
> to
> power each mesh AP, and was using dedicated wireless links between
> the 2,
> setting the cat 6 link to PoE only.
> 
> In what scenario would that ever be better than using the cat 6 as
> the data
> link back to the head of the network?
> 
> That doesn't make sense to me, but there's a high probability that
> there's
> something about mesh wifi I don't understand.
> 
> -Wes
> 
>