[TriLUG] Mesh WiFi

Tue Oct 27 14:05:22 EDT 2020

replying inline

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.

Clients  will connect to AP and band with the highest signal strength.
2.4ghz will have more reach as it is lower frequency but it has smaller
channels and more rf trash. You really want any 5ghz able device to be on
5ghz only. With dual band APs you also want to turn down the power levels
of the 2.4ghz, doing this will better  match range and signal strength of
both bands.

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.

You really dont want to do that, this will break roaming between APs. For
roaming to work the APs need to boardbast the same SSID name and password.
The SSID needs to be on the same vlan everywhere you have to re-ip
everytime you roam between APs. When you have to re-ip there will be a drop
of traffic that is noticeable. If roaming is working right you should only
lose 1-2 ping packets when switching between APs. Good APs will support
more than one SSID and vlan combo, this will allow you have the guest wifi
on its own vlan.

On Tue, Oct 27, 2020 at 1:49 PM Matt Flyer via TriLUG <trilug at trilug.org>
wrote:

> 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
> >
> >
>
> --
> This message was sent to: Zach Underwood <zunder1990 at gmail.com>
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-- 
Zach Underwood (RHCE,RHCSA,RHCT,UACA)
My website <http://zachunderwood.me>
advance-networking.com