As I was mentioning in my earlier post, I’ve had so many issues with the Google Wifi setup and I decided that I had to do something about it.

Back home in Sweden I had 3 unifi access points in our house. Those were a older and mixed models. But I wasn’t really that happy with them. Random strange things kept happening and I had to factory reset the AP every now and then. Now the question was, could I trust Unifi this time? I decided to order one of the smallest AP’s they have, the U6-Lite for only $99, and while I was ordering hardware already I also ordered a Flex-Mini switch since I didn’t have a switch here and I started to see a need.

Now, the tricky part for me with the installation and the switch was that I am running the controller at Hetzner as a VM on my Proxmox server. I did the same thing back home in Sweden. I configured the inform host to point at the controller but it just kept failing. I could resolve the dns name of the controller from my home network and the controller was replying to ping so obviously I had connectivity.

After reading up about people having similar issues I found a post where they where saying that “The U6-Lite does not support a search domain” Oh for f…sake. So what the switch did was trying to resolve unifi. only, no search domain added to the DNS query. I am running nextdns on my router and it’s basically a dnsmasq server on steroids. What I was looking for was:

use-hosts true

This instructs dnsmasq to also look in the hosts file of the router (which is a Debian machine)

So in the hosts file, I just added an entry for unifi

root@asterix:~# cat /etc/hosts
127.0.0.1       asterix
::1             localhost ip6-localhost ip6-loopback
ff02::1         ip6-allnodes
ff02::2         ip6-allrouters
192.168.101.44  unifi
root@asterix:~#

And yaay, now the switch would find it’s controller and start provisioning. Something that bugs me a bit though is this:

For me, this setting didn’t have any effect at all. I was running tcpdump on my router to monitor the traffic but no requests were sent out at all. But after that, I just plugged in the AP and it showed up direct and was ready to be adopted. Nice stuffs!

So how about performance then? Well it’s like night and day both for bandwidth throughput and latency.

Before

After

I am currently only running on one AP and that is sufficient for us. There’s one bathroom where there is no coverage but I won’t go out and by one more AP for just a bathroom.

The Design Planner gives a quite good idea about where to put the AP and the results based on the data I’ve entered matches quite good with reality. The most right bedroom does have much better reception though then what the design planner predicts.