-
9 votes
-
Accidentally Solving Access Point Roaming Issues.
I'm sharing in case some of you are having a similar issue at work or at home, and to hear your opinion and/or similar stories! I've been using Ubiquiti access points in my home for a few years...
I'm sharing in case some of you are having a similar issue at work or at home, and to hear your opinion and/or similar stories!
I've been using Ubiquiti access points in my home for a few years now, and overall, they've worked very well. 3 APs giving near perfect 5GHz VHT80 coverage on DFS channels. LAN transfers are about 600-650mbit on laptops, which has proven to be plenty for wireless clients in my home. Keep in mind that this is a pretty basic setup... besides the APs, there's just the ISP provided GPON ONT which is also a typical all-in-one ISP solution (router, switch, AP, firewall, DHCP server...) with it's Wi-Fi turned off.
As I said, I was pretty happy with the results, however there was one feature that I could never get to work just right; roaming. You could be walking around the house watching a live stream and the stream would pause for 5-8 seconds until the roaming transition was over. Strangely, with VoIP calls, roaming would be about 3-5 seconds. Even enabling fast roaming features (which I believe is simply 802.11r) on the AP's controller would not give the results I was looking for. After days of tweaking TX power settings, channel selection and trying to implement Minimum RSSI (which I ended up not using), I finally gave up and resigned myself to the 4-6 seconds (oh, the humanity) of roaming time.
Fast forward to about two months ago and I added a new router to the setup (UBNT ER-4) and a switch (UBNT USW-24). Setup went smooth, already had some cat.6 cabling around the house, now it was time to actually use it. Had some fun setting up a guest Wi-Fi network on it's own VLAN, which was always a concern of mine; having "untrusted" devices connect to my network. The access points do client isolation on guest networks by default, but in my mind it wasn't enough as I have some file servers and time machines on the network.
Anyways, a few days after doing the setup I'm walking around the house with a livestream on my mobile and suddenly realize that it's not losing the connection. I try with a VoIP call and it worked flawlessly. I start walking around faster and still, the phone is roaming without an issue. I was very excited!
I'm thinking it must be the router that somehow solved the roaming issue. My first theory was that the DHCP server on the ER-4 was doing it's thing much faster than the ISP's device, allowing the wireless clients to actually roam faster. So I do a web search and I find some very relevant info. It was a thread on a forum and reddit thread with a sysadmin that was about to give up on the APs because of roaming issues. In both threads, there were replies about what switch were they using.
Apparently, some switches (Cisco and HP were mentioned), have a "MAC aging" interval setting which is way too high by default, or they simply have bugged firmware that doesn't allow the switch to "re-learn" the MAC address of a device on a different switch port. I assume that ISP provided "el-cheapo" gear has similar issues.
So, if you're having roaming issues with your wireless clients, check your switches!!!
Anyways, just wanted to share this story. Thank you for reading. :-)
10 votes -
An Introduction to Mobile Networks, SIM Cards, and GSM.
9 votes -
New CSS Features in Firefox 68
18 votes -
Rome is the fulcrum of AMD's Datacenter Pivot
9 votes -
30 Weird Chess Algorithms: Elo World
10 votes -
Announcing PartiQL: an SQL-compatible, open source query language intended to work with many different types of data stores
5 votes -
Programming Algorithms: A Crash Course in Lisp
7 votes -
Armin Ronacher: Updated thoughts on trust scaling and the risks of dependencies
5 votes -
The gov.uk Design System
7 votes -
JavaScript: What’s new in ES2019
13 votes -
Dissecting A Dweet: Ring Weave ~ a 140 byte javascript animation
9 votes -
Proposed removal of kernel AX.25 support
5 votes -
What is your least favourite window manager or desktop environment and why?
Can be something current or ancient, and if you've really got an axe to grind feel free to drag in Windows or macOS or other proprietary operating systems. Personally after using i3 for around...
Can be something current or ancient, and if you've really got an axe to grind feel free to drag in Windows or macOS or other proprietary operating systems.
Personally after using i3 for around half a decade now (though I switched to sway about a year ago) everything else I try just seems to add friction.
25 votes -
What's your "must have" software for a MacBook Pro, especially for programming?
Just got my first MacBook Pro, and I've been setting things up. Wondering what people's "must have" software on MacOS is and what programming tools you might recommend. I've heard that I should...
Just got my first MacBook Pro, and I've been setting things up. Wondering what people's "must have" software on MacOS is and what programming tools you might recommend. I've heard that I should definitely install
homebrew
so that I can have a real package manager like I've got on Linux.19 votes -
the sierpinski triangle page to end most sierpinski triangle pages ™
9 votes -
Do you have a personal website/blog?
I've been thinking for a while about making my own little personal website/blog, and I was wondering what other people here on Tildes might have set up. I feel like having one could be a cool...
I've been thinking for a while about making my own little personal website/blog, and I was wondering what other people here on Tildes might have set up. I feel like having one could be a cool little way to get myself to write more often and hopefully improve my writing, especially when it comes to technical subjects.
34 votes -
Puffer, a machine learning research study by Stanford University which allows you to stream live TV in your browser
13 votes -
Deploying containerized Docker instances in production?
Hello! After spending many development hours in my past years running on Virtualbox/Vagrant-style setups, I've decided to take the plunge into learning Docker, and after getting a few containers...
Hello! After spending many development hours in my past years running on Virtualbox/Vagrant-style setups, I've decided to take the plunge into learning Docker, and after getting a few containers working, I'm now looking to figure out how to deploy this to production. I'm not a DevOps or infrastructure guy, my bread and butter is software, and although I've become significantly better at deploying & provisioning Linux VPS's, I'm still not entirely confident in my ability to deploy & manage such systems at scale and in production. But, I am now close to running my own business, so these requirements are suddenly going from "nice to have" to "critical".
As I mentioned, in the past when I've previously developed applications that have been pushed onto the web, I've tended to develop on my local machine, often with no specific configuration environment. If I did use an environment, it'd often be a Vagrant VM instance. From here, I'd push to GitHub, then from my VPS, pull down the changes, run any deployment scripts (recompile, restart nginx, etc), and I'm done.
I guess what I'm after with Docker is something that's more consistent between dev, testing, & prod, and is also more hands off in the deployment process. Yet, what I'm currently developing still does have differing configuration needs between dev and prod. For example, I'd like to use a hosted DB solution such as DigitalOcean Managed Databases in production, yet I'm totally fine using a Docker container for MySQL for local development. Is something like this possible? Does anyone have any recommendations around how to accomplish this, any do's and dont's, or any catches that are worth mentioning?
How about automating deployment from GitHub to production? I've never touched any CI/CD tools in my life, yet I know it's a hugely important part of the process when dealing with software in production, especially software that has clients dependent on it to function. Does anything specifically work well with Docker? Or GitHub? Ideally I want to be avoiding manual processes where I have to ssh in, and pull down the latest changes, half-remembering the commands I need to write to recompile and run the application again.
10 votes -
Dissecting A Dweet: Mini Black Hole
6 votes -
Slack Security Incident for Keybase CEO
20 votes -
History and effective use of Vim
6 votes -
Bigger Rewards for Security Bugs
6 votes -
Which technical/technological issues or needs do you think should have been sorted out by now?
20 years ago I saw a computer scientist on TV saying that operating systems should come up with a better way to organize and present files, something that took into consideration the files we used...
20 years ago I saw a computer scientist on TV saying that operating systems should come up with a better way to organize and present files, something that took into consideration the files we used the most and the ones we were likely to use again. Not just a recent files menu, but some form of AI prediction that would prepare our desktops with little intervention. This, of course, didn't happen, but I think about it from time to time. I would love to have an AI that would understand my workflow and do a bunch of things for me.
This is obviously way too advanced as an answer to this thread, but I'm curious: what did you expect to already exist in the field of computer science, but simply didn't pan out?
19 votes -
The PGP Problem
12 votes -
We fired our top talent. Best decision we ever made.
28 votes -
Cracking a windshield and earning $10,000 on the Tesla Bug Bounty Program
12 votes -
World's worst video card? The exciting conclusion - Building a VGA controller from discrete components
17 votes -
Deep TabNine: Autocompletion with deep learning
7 votes -
Ludwig: Uber open sourced a config-based deep learning tool
4 votes -
Is Heads-Up Poker in P?
4 votes -
Dissecting A Dweet ~ Spirograph Design Generator
6 votes -
Popular licenses in OpenAPI
5 votes -
Facebook and Carnegie Mellon's "Pluribus", the first AI to defeat professionals in 6-player poker
8 votes -
Reddit's redesign has been down all day, however mobile apps work, and old reddit works. Does reddit not use the same public API for the redesign?
I'm not sure if this is the case for everyone but the new reddit can't load any data, at least for me. However, old.reddit.com works, and all mobile apps seem to work which obviously use the...
I'm not sure if this is the case for everyone but the new reddit can't load any data, at least for me. However, old.reddit.com works, and all mobile apps seem to work which obviously use the reddit API. I am curious, does reddit have a different version of their API for the redesign, and that's what's been down for hours?
edit: I know that reddit must allow their own product to do things that other products don't.. Like it seems the chat api is not open to 3rd parties.. but I assumed that they would have just blocked certain api endpoints from public exposure. But based on my blind troubleshooting of this case, it seems that they must be using a totally different interface all together for the redesign?
edit2: Copy paste of my down-thread comment in case you don't read the whole thread, the context is that I realize that this must not be a global issue.Hmm, so I've heard reddit is super-cached... is this possibly a caching fault then?
reddit uses redis, correct? And it must be sharded, right? So maybe some redis cluster nodes are down?
I'm trying to learn here, and I am likely asking the wrong questions.. The goal of my post was to understand this type of failure, as I realize that it must be partial as in if all of reddit resign was down, it would be news. If anyone could correct any of my statements or assumptions I would really appreciate it.
13 votes -
Decoded: Rogue
7 votes -
Catching use-after-move bugs with Clang's consumed annotations
5 votes -
404 found
6 votes -
How To Build An App: Everything You Didn't Know You Needed To Know | Tom Scott
8 votes -
Data Analysis with Dr Mike Pound | Computerphile
6 votes -
Creator of "DeepNude" releases it as GPL licensed Open Source Software after previously taking it down
34 votes -
"Perl 6 is Cursed! I hate it!"
7 votes -
So you think you know C?
19 votes -
Building a VGA monitor timing circuit from scratch
14 votes -
Rust 2018 is here… but what is it?
34 votes -
Dissecting A Dweet ~ Spiral Javascript Quine Explained
12 votes -
Userinyerface — A worst-practice UI experiment
12 votes -
Choosing Boring Technology
13 votes -
Help us test ACO, a new Mesa shader compiler for AMD graphics!
7 votes -
Show: UNK, a sub-1000-byte ssg with included markup parser and template
7 votes