Rough & Ready - Ubiquiti UDB and UDB-Pro
Hi! Welcome to this, another one of the Tech Geeks videos. Today we're going to be having a look at the UDB and the UDB Pro. The UDB and, the UDB Pro here. This is a small wireless extender. Essentially, it is a PoE injector, with an antenna on. It can be run without the antenna.
It's got an Ethernet port out to provide PoE. And we can use this and position this somewhere where we've just got mains power, maybe up to 30 metres or so away from our main wireless. The great thing about this - it's part of the Unifi range. It will find its way home. So you don't need to connect it up to start with.
You just need to be able to put this out of the place where it can see your current Ubiquiti wireless, and it will be able to find its way home and you'll be able to configure it. So, this could be really good for attaching maybe a camera that you couldn't get an Ethernet cable out to, maybe even, something to do a gate opener. We're going to be testing this to see what we can get going with a UA-Hub or a UA-Ultra.
Maybe even a G, to read a Pro as well, see whether it's got power to do that. And then you've got something like the, the Pro model here. So, the Pro model, How you be... You wouldn't be wrong if you thought this looked very much like one of the Ubiquiti airMAX products.
Again, these can be used as singles. So again, to extend your Wi-Fi a bit of a further distance. Or you can use two of these together to create a bridge. And the great thing is that is, then again managed in your Ubiquiti Unifi controller, your OS console.
So we're going to try and get some idea of the performance that we're going to see out of this, and the distance that we're going to get and the throughput speed. The same as this. See what we can power with it, as well. And then we're going to run two of these together in a bridge. You can add extra power over Ethernet injectors to this or higher power. So we're going to try that as well with the second Ethernet port. And then we're going to do this with a wireless, using them as a wireless bridge at about 800 metres.
Not easy line of sight. No particular lining up. It's going to be some trees and some buildings in the way as well and actually see how those perform. So, hopefully you find this video useful. It is a bit rough and ready. Please do use the chapters as well.
They will help you find the bits in there that might be useful to you. So, let's get into some of the configuration. Okay, so try to work out - I probably spent about 8 or 9 hours literally solid trying to find out all the ins and outs of this setup, to make it work both using this, which is the Unifi device bridge, and the PRO that I've got over here. So hopefully I'm going to be able to give you some of the information I have found. There's lots of YouTubers who have gone "Oh, I just clicked this here and it works perfectly." If you have got a very sim- seamless setup, no VLANs, then everything will work with this, and even when you've got VLANs with this really well, with the PRO, a little less, but we can go through some of that as we happen.
So, to make this simpler, what I've got is I've got my UCG-Max running here. This is powered on an old AC-PRO over here. Remember, that both of these, the PRO and the the Standard are just wireless 5.
They don't support 2.4GHz. They only run in the 5GHz. Okay, so, that's all we need to use for this.
So we're just going to have a simple test. We're going to get this paired up and working against this, Too, a couple of things in here, we have probably covered before... you can run this without this antenna on. We'll hopefully be able to do some speed tests to show you what you get just with this, connected or have the antenna on it.
Probably. If you just got this inside, this might be all that you need. Maybe if you've just got some standard Gyprock walls, and you want to extend the Wi-Fi inside. So, we're going to do, set that up. I want to see whether, firstly,
whether it will actually power. I've got a G5 camera on a pole. Probably pretty difficult to put in the camera here and show you. It's just a little, very simple setup here. There we go - G5. Bullet on a pole. So, all we're going to do is connect that up and see whether that will find its way back to our UNVR. And then what I want to try, I want to try and see, this is the Ultra.
This is the UA-Ultra. This is a gate opener. I want to see whether this will actually work, be powered by this. Technically, this uses about 18 Watts of power. But we should find that this is giving out enough at 15 Watts. It should work. I will try and see whether it'll power the UA-Hub.
Pretty sure that it won't. But with a a PoE upgrade on the PRO model, we should be able to power it. So that's the idea. We're going to try and work through those and see what we can do.
Some of it will be done over here, some of it will be done on the computer. So, what we're going to do first is we're going to at least get this unit powered on. So like I said, we're just going to base this on the fact that there are no VLANs in play. So we are just going to run this, in standard set up.
This will find its way back through automatically, through this. So, I'm going to hop on to the computer. But at least we can see what's going on with this as we work through.
Okay, So, I've just hopped on over to computer, having a look at the actual UDB there in the middle. You can see that I've just powered it on, and it had a white light to start with. It has now gone to full signal strength. And what you can see is it's actually automatically found its way home. So we can see it here waiting to be adopted in our setup. And all I need to do now is actually click on the adopt button, and that will now start to add it into the network.
If you again refresh yourself on the screen. On the close up there, I've got, you've got no other cables connected to this. This literally was just turned on and it found a Ubiquiti wireless setup and immediately knew how to connect it. So, this is what I have seen, like I said before, VLANs. If you've got multiple SSL IDs,
that seems to have some level of issue. and when you have multiple VLANs. I think it's probably more the VLANs that's the issue. Because it doesn't know how to deal with it. I will show you a couple of options, once it's ready, of how I have tested it.
And do know that this device, the UDB, will certainly pass through VLANs. You can't determine what VLAN the switch port is on. But you can determine what goes on beyond that. So, we'll just let this come in.
I'm just going to put this and rename this "FrontCameraBridge." Because what is this useful for? This is really useful if we are going to be able to put this in a location where we have maybe got power, but we don't actually have Ethernet. It's going to make it a real simple, easy way to actually connect to it. And then, obviously on power, another device.
So, we'll just wait for a moment until this picks up all of the changes that I've sent over to it. I'm impatient. So I refresh the screen a lot. All right. We can see already. Now it says it's up to date.
We can see what it's connected through. So let's have a look at what's going on over here. We can see, up here, our signal strength. We wouldn't expect it to be anything different because it's actually sitting next to the AC PRO that we've got there.
We can see what version it's running on. You probably will want to update it to a more recent version. When you get there, we can see it's synced at 400 meg a second. So that's our great starting point. We can see everything is going on. If we click in Port manager. Port manager shows us nothing because we've got nothing connected to it.
But it will do when we connect up something else like the camera in a moment. So let's have a look at our other options, our insights. Obviously this is CPU statistics and anything else that's around the device. You may use that, you may not. In here, there's not a lot. You can turn off meshing. We don't want to turn off meshing. Certainly not.
And then we can choose whether we have this as a static or a DHCP IP, and we can turn off the LEDs if we want to. Now, in this, if you have VLANs, then you do have an option here to override the VLAN. That only overrides the actual VLAN the physical device connects and runs on and so ultimately, it's IP address that it gets. The actual switch port itself seems to carry all of the VLAN.
So, you can - because I have tried it - connect a VLAN-enabled switch. And all of those VLANs are passed across. So, let's, let's just see if we can rename this "Front CameraBridge." It does seem to be having a little struggle on my unit. Probably how I've wired this up at the moment.
For actually running. And it keeps telling me, I don't know whether that is just something out with the Ubiquiti site at the moment. Let's just give that a moment to catch up. We'll apply those changes.
Hopefully, those will set in a moment for the device. And it will rename itself. So, that is really all that there is in that to do right now. So, what I'm going to do now is, we will just go I'm just going to go and connect up onto that second port a G5 camera.
So you can see that that starts to start up, and then we'll actually be able to see - show you the footage, so you know that that's actually working. And then we can move on a couple of other tests. We can plug the computer in and do a speed test and a few other bits with it like that. So what I'm just going to do now is just going to take the camera that we've got connected, and pop that into here, and that now should actually be starting up. So, we'll just let that boot for a couple of moments, and then we should be able to have a look in our UNVR. And we should actually be able to see that come online.
All right, so while that's booting, let's just have a little look. We should be able to go into Port manager, in a moment now. And it should actually show us that something is going on with that port, and that I've actually plugged in. There we go. We can see our camera bridge has been passed in. It's connected at fast Ethernet. Something I did notice at the moment. It doesn't actually show you the amount of power that's being used.
It would have been nice to see that, but I guess because it's just 48 Volts and 15 Watts of standard PoE, it'll just drive out what it can. So you've got the option to name the port if you want to. You can power cycle it, you can disable it. You can obviously turn PoE off if you want to. If you were just using that as a downlink, you might decide that that's a better option on there.
And then you've got options for setting the speed, if you want. We can probably leave that on Auto or Auto Negotiation. And we are only getting a hundred meg a second because it's a G5 camera, anyway. So, that is really all you actually get to see in the Port itself.
I don't know whether the camera has actually come online yet. Not at this moment in time. Hopefully, in a few more moments that will actually find its way home. So let's just let this, finish updating itself.
All right. Let's just see if we push the changes there. There we go. All right. Come back to our devices. We can obviously see that it's running on here. It's got this camera connected to it Shows he's got an excellent condition on it.
And I'm now just waiting for my camera to call home. Now, this will be calling back on a different network. But it has actually, you can see it's got the IP address assigned to it. And you can actually see that that camera is up and running and you can see me there. All right.
But you can actually see the the full set up of what's actually working here. So we know that that camera is powered up, and working. We can see we're doing, got a bit rate of 10 Megabits a second if it needs to. But plenty of things happening there. So, we can actually see that, that out the box was working without any problems at all.
So what we'll do now is we'll swap that over, and you can even see this camera is shown in the setup here as well. And that what it's actually connected to, which is pretty cool. What we're now going to do is I like to just try and see what happens if we just connect a normal computer, make sure that we get an IP address and then we can maybe do a quick speed test, because those would be great just to show that we could then connect a switch to it if you wanted to then downlink to something else. So, what we're going to do is we are going to take out the camera and plug in my laptop. You might want to change this, and turn PoE off in there to make it a little bit better, a little bit safer.
Because my laptop won't understand PoE. So, what we could do for that now, if we wanted to, is we could just go into here again into Port Manager. Give it a moment to tell us what's actually happening. It doesn't tell us anything at the moment. Just making sure my laptop is connected.
So I think we're just waiting for this to update. What's actually going on? It doesn't say. Here we go. So, what we can do is maybe just turn PoE off.
Just so I'm not sending PoE to my laptop, we can see the laptop is actually connected. So what I'm just going to do now is just remote into my laptop. Let me just start the application up over here and remote into the laptop. Here we go.
We've got a speed test. These were some ones that I was doing yesterday as a little bit of a test. So let's just move those out the screen so it doesn't confuse us. All being well, we should be able to connect to this in a moment. Here we go. Let's just try and see what we can do. Oh.
All right, so let's just run this. This is going to give us a speed test of what we can actually do with this device. And you can actually see we're hitting about 95 - or between 93 and 95. So that really is giving us a true 100 megabits a second. I'm not sure whether I'd expect more on this physical device.
I think on the PRO, when I tested, I was able to get a bit faster. But we'll have a look when we get to there. So, you can see we got 104 megabits a second there as well. So, there is a fairly good throughput happening already. But obviously this is right next to the devices we're testing.
So we can at least now see that this computer's got an IP address. If we were to now put a switch on here, we could put a switch on here. And look, I have tested it. This is VLAN. If this will trunk all, it will pass all the VLANs. So, you can just put the switch on with VLANs enabled, and it will pass them through as well.
So, there are a few options there that do actually work. Now what am I trying to do, I'm going to put on again the PoE pass through, should be all right. I will push this on and then I will go and just quickly unplug my laptop and we will change this over now to have the UA-Ultra, because I'd really like to see now whether we can actually unlock the door or use this as an unlock option. Sorry, the laptop from there.
And we will just use a short cable here. Let's use this little red one that we've got over here. And we're just now going to power our UA-Ultra.
This has already been paired here with my main door, Unifi Access. I don't know whether we're going to see that, so we gonna see that that is powering up. And again, it's found its way home. So back at the computer, we can see that that's powered up.
And it's trying to find its way home at this moment in time. If we go to our access controls, here, and have a little look, here. It is already actually connected online. It's even telling me it needs an update.
So, what can we actually do if we I wanted to know, firstly, would it do it and would it have enough power to do it. Let's click the unlock button. All right. We can actually hear that that unlocked.
You can see that the lights came on and actually unlocked it. I don't think I can... I can possibly just quickly do that off my phone So you can just see that it works. And actually unlocks the door. So let me just do that directly from my phone. So let me find.
Here we go. So if I do the unlock and you can see now that that has unlocked it, and in a moment that should probably lock it. There we go. So you can see that that does work. What we will try and do, maybe while we're just at this, let's just try and see. Could we get enough power to actually power this over here, which is the UA-Hub.
Now, this does need PoE plus. So, I'm sort of expecting some alarms. So, we've got DPS flashing on here. And we have got, although this is trying to give some PoE and this is actually booting, which is interesting, as you can see. This hasn't gone solid yet. So let's just see if that will boot.
I'd be quite surprised if it did. I think, you probably can't quite see that. Let me just push this one up a little bit further so you can see it. That one itself says that it has actually been able to connect and it's got enough power, and logged back in or it at least started.
I can't actually see it on here. So, I would have expected it to have actually been able to call home. We'll just wait for a couple of minutes in case it does. I think what it is doing - it's receiving enough PoE power to boot up. But I don't think the UA-Hub is getting enough power to boot up. And as a result, ah and just as he says that. There we go. So, the Reader has started
but the Hub itself isn't actually there. And that would probably just indicate to me that the Hub is passing on enough PoE power to actually run the Reader itself. And then you can see, you even see you've got an image looking up, but the actual Hub itself does not receive what it needs to actually make sure it works. So, it was pretty much as I was expecting, but I was just intrigued that the Reader even booted it itself. Although, the light has now gone solid on the Hub from what I can see. So, let's just see whether I'm actually going to be proved wrong There we go! This is actually, surprisingly enough, got enough power to start up.
And has actually, been able to get the Reader running. There we go. So, the Reader is actually running, and you can see that, there we go. A bit of reverb.
We can see that actually running. So, all of that has actually logged in. So, what I'm going to actually, quickly do is I'm just going to quickly connect the terminals for the door lock, just in case we can actually get that running, as well, which would be really, really interesting. So, we just need to take these out of the terminal block on here. Just removing the wires from the terminal block there.
And I'm just going to connect these into the terminal block over here. I'm pretty sure that we go into "NO" and "COM", I think is the way that it goes. All right. So obviously, you might be limited to other items that you can have running from this with the amount of power that you have.
But let's just have a little look. Main entrance here. Click to unlock. Hello. There you go. You can see that
the door actually unlocked. So, I was quite surprised on that. And again, what frustrates me a little bit is I can't see anywhere in here where I can actually see the PoE power that is being drawn, because I know that the UA-Hub really should use PoE Plus. But we've managed to start up both devices. So, it would indicate to me that that 15 Watts as an initial go is what I all I would actually need to make it work. So if you're trying to get something down to the gate, this could be a really good option for you. If you've got mains power
down there, certainly go for the UA-Ultra as the simple, straightforward way. But if you haven't, you and you've got a UA-Hub, you might be able to get it to work. Certainly with the Pro, you'll have a lot more power. Just remember, if you were trying to do this and add on a camera or something, it's probably not going to work at that point in time. So we've basically done a speed test.
We've tested what other components we've added a camera. We've tried a UA-Ultra and we've also done a UA-Hub. So, we've got a great collection of things that are already working and seen.
So hopefully you can see how that works. We will go on and do some distance tests with this shortly. But really a simple solution.
What we're going to now do is swap this over to using the Pro model. And see what we can actually do with that. As that was a little bit more fussy in the setup, but it should follow fairly much the same principles. So what we'll do is we'll just disconnect all of the bits that we had, in this scenario. So, we're just going to take out our UA-Hub from the setup.
We are going to then just power off here. Take the power out for this device, which we'll come back to a little bit later on. And we're just going to now come back here to our Pro model. Now, the Pro model comes with a PoE injector. This comes with a standard UPoE So, this again, probably not massive wattage out on that. Probably, to be fair, less than what you're actually going to get with this.
So, we will just start it with this. We'll do the same set of processes that we did. So, we're just going to plug that in to the power there. And you can see the light starting to come on, on that side. Okay. So, a little bit tricky to see those lights happening on there. But you can just about see that white flashing light, and we're hoping for it again to find its way home, just like we did before.
And it should appear in here ready to be adopted. So let's just see. We haven't got anything waiting to be adopted, but we have found all the other items that had been running on here. It is a little bit slow, as you know, this is not - this is just how the Ubiquiti is. It's picking up the devices that are actually running. So, this won't always be a complete up to date run through of what's happening.
But it does give you at least a good idea of what is going on. So, we're just going to wait for a moment. Hopefully, in a minute, we will see our new device find the Wi-Fi, and start its journey home. This is the bit we often have to be a little bit more patient with. Because it's got to find its way back through the wireless. And it's looking for a wireless connection that is fairly close by and I've got a few Wi-Fi connections running in the property.
So, it will try to be available on a few of those different ones. So, we can see now it's arrived. There is our UDB-Pro. So, we can now click on adopting, and we will see. This does go through a few things that I've noticed on this. If you factory default these units, it seems to be that once you've done a factory default, it doesn't reboot completely afterwards.
So, you wait for it to do a factory default, and it seems to be that all the lights actually go out. Then after that, I've found that I have to pull the power for it to then start back up again. So what we're looking for is the little white light on there eventually is going to go blue.
And when that goes blue, hopefully, we will then see this active. So the UDB-Pro. What does this do? It's got a greater range.
I've always talked about wireless being about density, not distance. We've always talked about the weak device, the weak thing being not actually the access point, but the device connecting. The scenario, if you've talked to us before, is I look at this as a parent and a child go out with a soccer ball.
The parent kicks the soccer ball. And where that soccer ball stops, they say to the child, you need to now kick that back to me. It's unlikely the child would be able to kick that soccer ball all the way back to the parent. If that parent's an access point and the child is the device, your phone or your laptop, it's all about the power of the antenna, and the strength of that that is in that device, not the access point. So, what we're essentially doing with both the UDB and the UDB-Pro is we're making high powered devices that therefore can connect over a longer distance.
So, the UDB-Pro, the idea is that maybe even at 2 or 300 metres, this could still connect back to your normal Wi-Fi. Because it has a good antenna and signal strength, it will therefore not draw down the rest of that network. You can see now that we've got a whole bunch of lights that have come on on the outside of our UDB-Pro, so, we know that it's actually starting to get itself ready. If you were doing this and you've got multiple SSL IDs or multiple VLANs. At this point, it seems to go a little bit all over the place. I've had it create loops.
I've had it basically just freeze. So, I would suggest you, if you've got VLANs and you want to use the UDB-Pro, use the UDB-Pro in a pair, and in a pair use them as a bridge. And that's probably like the best way of actually making this work when you do it in a bridge. This is going to give you the distance.
You're going to be able to manage it all the way here in this software, as well in normal Unifi. And it also is actually pretty straightforward to do and we'll show you, hopefully a bit later on in the video, how to actually make that work. So, you'll see that it's gone, like I said, to all of the 4 blue lights. It does take a little bit longer up to there. There we go. It's now come up to date.
In here, we have a few different options. So, for this device we're actually able to set it as either a parent or a child. And so, in that scenario we can make it paired with something else. This won't do - this is my understanding - is it won't do point-to-multipoint. It will do point-to-point. So, it will allow you to pair another device with it.
This would become the parent, and I'll show you some of that bit of set up later on. But again, we can see what's going on with our connectivity. Remember, this is a 5 Gigahertz-only device. Get some more stats for what's going on with this. Again, we can name this if we want to. We can do the PoE power.
And it's very interesting. It does give you a warning when you're adopting it, that maybe makes sure that nothing is connected into the second port. So, that PoE isn't pushed through there by accident. And you can see at the moment this is in child mode, and is connected to an AC Pro. If you have other access points, you can choose it to patch it or pair it with another access point, which might be quite good if you're moving this around. Those are really the really simple bits.
So we're just going to repeat the process that we've done before just to prove that it works. Well, prove and see what we can actually get powered with the standard PoE injector that comes with the box, which I think probably won't have a higher wattage as the UDB on its own. So we may just need to change the power pack over. So, let's do that first. Let's go and just connect up a camera. Just make sure that that works. Then we'll do a speed test.
And then we'll try the UA-Ultra and the UA-Hub again just to see where we can get to with that. Basically, we plug the camera into the second port down here. We can see over here a second LED showing. And it's come with its standard PoE injector there. So, let's just have a look back over on here. We should have the similar thing that we had before.
In this instance, we don't have a Port Manager, which we did on the previous one, which is, so we're just going to see whether it talks about anything now that's been plugged in or whether we can see any more useful information about what is being Well, I can see my camera has actually come on. Obviously, we had our DB levels. It doesn't seem to give us anything extra in here. It shows our parent. It shows what our stats are for levels for wireless.
But we don't seem to actually have anything else in here that gives us any more useful information. I thought it might do. It doesn't actually give us anything on this one about power. I guess because all it's doing is passing through the power, whereas the other one was a wireless power block. So again, we can see our camera is working.
So, I'm not really going to be too worried about that. If we go back to our cameras again, we should see that front camera is totally running. Just to prove that that's actually working. Here we go. Wave my hand hidden behind all the monitors. All right, so we know that that is actually functioning.
So, let's now repeat the process. So what we're now going to do is I'm just going to go and plug the laptop in. I'm going to do a little bit of a speed test. That'll give us an idea. And then I'm going to go on to the UA-Ultra and the UA-Hub.
Okay, so before I just jump over that way, I'm actually going to do, because I just while I remember, is I'm going to turn the PoE passthrough off. I prefer not to pass anything through to my laptop. Now let's switch it over. So, we're just going to take that second port out here, and switch that over to my laptop. Again, I'm hoping in a moment.
There we go. The second Ethernet port light has now come on. Or is coming on. There we go.
That's all on and running. All right. Let's go and do our speed test again.
Remember, we're getting 100 meg a second on the UDB. Let's open up some sessions here. Okay. We're again sitting at those hundred meg a second, which I find quite interesting. I thought that we might get a faster speed, a faster throughput than that.
I did some tests yesterday, and I was able to get a faster speed, which is very interesting Okay, so I did think a few things were slightly wrong just with my speed test that I was expecting. So, we will go back in again in a moment and just retest the UDB itself. But let's just do it with this one here. So, I just realised that the network connector on my laptop that I was using to test probably wasn't as good as it needed to be. So let's just do a speed test here now. Okay, so, you can see we're getting about 270 meg a second. 269, 270 meg a second,
which is really, really good throughput on that as a set up. So, what we'll do is we'll go through now and just check that that UA-Ultra works and the UA-Hub. No reason why those won't. And then we'll just do a quick speed test again of the UDB before we go and do the distance. But as you can see, this is a really, really versatil solution.
And I would expect to see these speeds even, you know, at maybe 100, 150, maybe 200 metres or a bit further. So, it's a great way to be able to get a bridge out to a device. But if we want to do a point-to-point, then again, we can use two of these UDB-Pros together.
So let's just quickly switch on over, and connect up again the UA-Ultra just to prove that works. And then the UA-Hub, and then we know that we've got that... those bits working. So, let's just again, first you've got to remember to go and turn our PoE power on. And let's just switch those over. Ok, so we're just going to take the laptop out of there, try and organise what we've got. Remember, we're using the standard PoE injector that comes with it.
And we're just going to plug in here our UA-Ultra and let that call home. Hopefully that will stay on there. Can see that it's already calling home. So, what we're just waiting for now is this door.
Here we go. It's appeared on here. And now it should be in. We should be able to hit unlock. We can see it flashes. We heard a beep, that happened over there. And so, we know that that's unlocking it.
So remember, this is with the standard PoE. Should be no problem again, powering the door. So let's just repeat that process. We're just going to change it over to power the UA-Hub now.
And let's just see whether there's enough power with that standard PoE injector. I would probably recommend that you did upgrade it to the U-Po the U-PoE... whatever it is U-PoE -AT (Alpha Tango) which will give it PoE Plus up to 30 Watts and make sure you got plenty of power then running to the UA-Hub.
But let's just switch that over. So we'll just unplug our UA-Hub, move that. So, UA-Ultra, move that out the way there. Bring in, our Hub UA-Hub Reader and Door Strike.
Let's just see if we can keep those in a place that you can see whether they're powering up. So they are all actually, powering up correctly. And when we did this before, if you remember, it took quite a while for that light to go solid. But it is all powering up there with the standard PoE injector. If it does work, that's great. I would just again suggest that you did upgrade it if you're going to add any cameras or anything else like that.
So, let's just give it a few moments because it does just take a couple of minutes to actually, get itself running for where it needs to be. We're looking for that light to go solid on the top. We hopefully will see the Reader very shortly come online here in our access control panel. There we go. So, the Reader has come online.
We now just waiting for the Hub, which is this device here, to actually come online. Let's just go here and prove that is working. Get a live feed. There we go. We can get some feedback as well.
So we know that's working. I'm just going to wait for that light to go solid on the UA-Hub, just to know that it works. And then we'll be able to move on and do a few further distance tests with speed as well, which I think will hopefully be useful to give you an idea of really how all of this fits together and works. So we're just waiting for that light to go solid, which hopefully will only take a couple more moments. There we go.
The light's gone solid, so I'm hoping just in a couple of minutes time we'll actually see this arrive at the top of our list, and we'll be able to send an unlock to the door and we'll know that that's working. Here we go. So the main entrance is now come online.
If we click to unlock. That was very interesting. Did you see that? So we sent that unlock and then everything, all the power went off on that. So that was obviously just drawing a little bit too much, for that set up to actually work. And I presume all of these items have actually gone offline.
So what we'll do is we'll just repeat that process, because none of the lights are running and we're going to just upgrade that to an AT power supply and see whether that actually works for us. So, what you can see is actually the device is now forced itself into a reboot, which just shows we're not getting enough power. So what we're going to do is we're just literally going to swap over this, which is the power supply that comes with it. So it just proves that the power supply on here is actually quite a bit heftier than that.
And that's why it works, because you've got the 15 Watts with that. So, we're just going to take this out, swap it over for the AT model here. All right. And get that one powered up.
So that will bring the bridge, the bridge back online for us there in a moment, which should then also bring the Hub and everything else back online again. So let's just check that I've got that all wired around the right there. Yep. This is starting up. This should then supply power to that as it starts. So I think that was an interesting thing to see. It did everything up until we sent the unlock command, and then when we hit that unlock command that was just too much power for it all to actually work.
So, we're just going to give that a couple of minutes. We can see it's just booting. So, we just hold for a moment. And then we will carry on. Okay. So we're just waiting. We can see the UA Reader has powered up now, and just come online, which is great.
That's a good start. We're just waiting for that Hub to finish and come online and then we'll be able to try and send an unlock to that and see how that works. All right. So that's now gone solid. And so just in a moment, hopefully we will see main entrance come online here, and then we can just repeat this process.
Just make sure we can unlock the door. Here we go. So main entrance is here. Let's choose to send an unlock this time. And we can see that it actually unlocked correctly.
So we do need that enhanced power supply on here, if we are going to make it work with the UA-Hub. And you might want to do that if you do the UA-Ultra, although it did look like everything was going to work at that point in time, although I didn't actually try with the door lock on. But it would have been fairly close, probably to making it work. So! We are at that point. So what we're going to do now is just going to swap back, to the UDB, and just do a proper speed test. So I know that we've got a proper speed test mark from that.
And then we'll start doing some distance checks with that just to show you how that would work at certain distances. But I hope that has been useful to this point. To actually be able to see how we can use this just to bridge from your current Unifi Access out to a location where you've just got mains power. You can run
cameras from it. You can run door access systems from it. You could put other access points connected to it. So quite a versatile and fairly easy to use solution. So. let's just move that power around again.
Okay. So, what we're just going to do again - just going to take this offline and move all of this lot out of the way. We're just going to take our UDB and turn that on and allow that connect up so we can do the speed test with it. I'm just going to wait for that to finish its synchronisation. We'll just go back to our Gateway Max here.
Right. So it just took a couple of minutes for my laptop to get going. Let me just bring that over here. And let's just run this.
So, we're getting about 306 Megabits a second to actually getting a bit faster than the UDB Pro, probably because of the angle and where the UDB Pro was positioned as well. But that's showing that we're getting a really fast speed, just even off the simple, basic UDB. So let's go and do some distance measurement now and give us an idea of what happens when we go through concrete walls and when we go outside.
Okay, so we're heading here to a little bit of testing. We are... So, I've got this going. It has got the antenna in it. It's 5 metres away from that AC Pro, through 1 Besser break, concrete- filled wall. So you can see here we've got a speed, we've got a DB of -57.
Just going to quickly jump on the laptop that is connected to that. So, like I said, 5 metres, 1 concrete wall, no external antenna on it. Let's just run the speed test now. 294, 295 meg a second. I'm just going to pop the antenna on it. I'm not sure we're going to get much different when we pop the antenna on it, but let's just do that, and then we'll move it to the next location.
Okay. So we've moved that out. Put the extra antenna on it. Let's just have a quick look at the back on here.
Clear a few of these screens away while we're at it. All right, so I've put the other antenna on it. Let's just have a quick look, see whether we've improved. Not very much.
Maybe just one or yeah, two DB. There we go. So slightly better. Let's just run back. I'm not sure we're going to get any better speed. We're 297, 299, 304, 302. So yeah, about another 5 or 6 meg a second.
So that's a good, useful start. We're gonna now move that again behind another concrete wall about 5 metres on, and give it another test. Okay, so, this device is now at about 11 metres, and only has the internal antenna enabled. So, as you can see, that's pretty low So, it's at 10, 10 -11 metres through 2 3 Besser brick walls.
So, concrete-filled, so 3 concrete walls. I'm not sure whether we're going to get much of a speed with that. And we're going to put the antenna on it again. We're still obviously connected 100 meg a second. So not not bad. 105 there we go. So let's just go put the external antenna on and see if we can bring that up a little bit further.
Okay. So put that other external antenna back on it. It's come up a little bit. It's still at -80. So it is quite poor.
But like I said, 11 metres, 3 concrete walls. So, let's just have a little look at speed. So down to 85, 89, 90 megs. So, it's still acceptable speed. And it's pretty consistent. I don't think we're losing any packets doing this, so I'm quite pleased and that that's inside a, you know, a property, a normal property that would be pretty good for extending the wireless.
So, what I'm going to try and do is try and see what we can do and push this a little bit more outside. So we're going to have again, the AC Pro will remain inside. But obviously if you did have an access point or outdoor access point, you probably would obviously get further from this because it would have a bigger antenna on it. But I just want to see if you just didn't do anything and just push this out to outside.
So let me go and move this set up outside. We'll see what we can come back with. Okay, so this is at about 30 metres through one glass window with a mesh door on it. Outside, just again from the AC Pro. So, you can see if we go back over here, it's still connected at -85. The laptop is still connected.
Probably wouldn't take it much lower than this. You can see we're sort of getting 30, 37, 50. So this would probably be my distance of saying. Or you might be able to improve this, obviously, if you had an outdoor antenna, an AC Mesh or AC Mesh Pro or something like that running on it. But you get 40 meg a second at 30 metres for this little device.
If you got power, it's going to get you to most people's gates if you need to. So hopefully that's been useful for looking at the UDB on distance. And now we're going to look on the UDB Pro, which should give us greater coverage. All right. So, we're just going to try now the UDB Pro I have done one through run through of this already.
So sorry if there was a little bit of continuity mess-up there. I tried to push the channels out to be a bit faster together. On the AC Pro to push them to 80, because I wanted to see if I could get a better speed.
That seems to change the channel. The channel then meant that the device didn't connect anymore, and it dropped off GigE and I had the factory reset and anyway. So, just be sensitive. Once you've set this up, try not to make too many changes. Especially, you've got to see this as a device that may need some help reconnecting. So we can see over here, we're at 5 metres. 5 metres with 1 concrete wall.
So let's just jump on over to the laptop, and do a quick test on there. So, let's just do a speed test. Here we go. There you can see 220, 221 megabits a second, which is sort of what we were expecting.
So, I'm just going to jump this through, put this the end of what 11 metres and 3 concrete walls, and we'll try again. All right. So, at 11 metres and 3 concrete walls. Let's just have a look. Our DB here is drop down to -58. So let's just jump on over again to the computer.
Let's just see, the indicator is still showing strong signal strength on the outside, so we've dropped quite a lot. Here, it's certainly dropped a lot more than I was expecting. And it does show that the little device is a little bit happier on this.
I think this is actually quite directional. And that does have some bearing on it. So I'm just going to move this now, and try it again one more time. So that will be 1, 2, 3, 4 concrete walls. And, and about 17, 18 metres.
So, let's just try that and then we'll try outside. All right. So, 4 concrete walls, and we're seeing a little bit more of a drop down. Not a lot. The speed - let's have a little look at that.
Probably have dropped off quite a lot. Probably still good for a camera, though. Out there. Look, 38, 35 meg a second. That's pretty good. We're not getting any packet loss. It's sitting pretty solidly there.
So I'd be pretty good at that. That's that's going to support a couple of cameras at that distance, having gone through those couple of concrete walls. But let's just see if we can get a better speed directly outside. Which will be another thing where I think that this will probably start to perform better than the just the standard model. So let's just move this outside and we'll try again. Okay.
So, this is sitting at 30 metres direct line of sight. You can see we're at -50, which is a pretty solid signal. Let's just pick a pop up here to our speed test again, 80 meg, 75 to 80 meg, which is really good speed. I thought we'd get a bit further with this one. Now just going to try and see if we can push some of the distance a little bit further. So just show you there on the screen what we were getting.
The DB level was pretty low at that point. Again, the access points inside, if I had an outside access point, we get a lot further at about 55 metres. It was passed through a couple of walls, trees. It was a few bits obscuring and the glass and the mesh on the window that it was behind. So you can see we're sitting between 9 and 12 meg a second.
I reckon you probably could get a little bit better than that. But that is a pretty good again place for that distance. Remember, this is just extending out that ability to bridge another device. So, a good starting point. Like I said, I know that people have got for a lot further than that in a very clear line of sight with a really good outdoor.
I like to just try and set this up in a bridge now and actually see how that works. And I'll show you how that all fits together. All right, so just for this last bit, what we're going to do is now pair up two UDB-Pros, give them a little bit of distance check. I found that you should be able to use the same auto uplink, but I found it was much easier to actually bring these devices and actually Ethernet cable them in and then set them up. That's how I found it to consistently work.
So I've brought the first one that we've been working on today and I've actually plugged it in. You can see that that's gone as As you - as adopting now. I think it's probably because an up to date probably just because we plugged it into the Ethernet cable.
So you can actually see now, over here, it's still set as a child, and what it was connected to. So I'm actually now going to change this to be a parent. And we should now be able to apply this. Obviously, we could potentially increase the channel bandwidth here if we wanted to increase the speed. So that could be an option to play with whether we'll get a chance to play with that.
But I'm just going to show you out of the box what this is actually going to do. So this unit now essentially is ready just the same as you would have configured any bridge. This is now functional and waiting for another device to connect. So what I'm actually going to do is I'm just going to plug in another one of these, but I'm going to plug it directly into the Ethernet cable, connection into this UCG Max that I'm running.
And we're going to then adopt it, go through the process of actually adopting it. And then once it's actually adopted, because I think what's happening and this is just going through and trying to rejoin to this network over here, which isn't too helpful. And that's why it's spinning around and around. And then we'll get the other device connected to this, and what should then be able to happen. We've got a bridge in place, and we can just quickly check the speed of that bridge, and then we can go do some distance checks with it as well.
So let me just go and connect up the other device. And then we'll be able to go from there. Okay. So what I think actually happening, we've got quite a lot of things going on here that I think we've just got a loop going. So, I'm actually going to factory reset this device, and actually readopt it to the network because I think that that's just going to stop it trying to wirelessly connect, which is what it seems to be trying to do at this moment in time.
And then my device down here, as we can see, has already been adopted to another controller while I was testing it. So I'm just going to factory default this one as well. And then get those back online and hopefully then it will run through the nice adoption process and we won't have the loop that is trying to be created here. Which obviously isn't totally ideal for our set up. So just bear with me for a few minutes while I just get those connected together in the right way. Okay, so factory default in both units.
Like I said before, what I've seen is once you've chosen the factory default option, putting the pin in for about 10-15 seconds, that I do then find that I have to then after that also power cycle them Once the light has gone out, the white light goes out and you just end up with the blue light for when the Ethernet is connected. So we're just going to run through and adopt these to the controller, hopefully not causing us a blistering loop like we did last time. And then we can separate these out, once they're actually nicely paired together. So we're just going to let these run through. Looks like we're already getting there.
Although it looks like we might be causing some problems to the controller again while this is happening. But let's just see how this goes. Generally, I've found it to be quite quick when it's not actually doing it over the wireless connection, and over the wire. So hopefully this will just get there fairly quickly once it has actually all the lights. I'm just looking at the devices at the moment. I've got two blue lights sharing on one of them, which I think is messing with my network config here very, very slightly.
The other one's gone back to reset. So let's just try and see if we can get this page to actually load. So I did find this happened quite often.
Let's just see. Maybe we're closer this time round. And it might be better if you do one at a time. I just wasn't able to get them working smoothly when I did it as a test before I found that it was much easier to get both of them done wired in and then working from there.
All right, here we go. So this one still is a click on resolve. I can't remember why - it's adopting now. So this one here we're going to set as the parent. So we're just going to come over here. It's already set as a parent.
We can turn the pass through off because I don't need it to power anything at this moment in time. And that - get that up to date. This one over here is still a bit frustrated with itself by the looks of things. Maybe we're just going to give that a moment and just see whethe it just says the connection was interrupted.
So, let's just see whether it just wasn't happy coming online once we can get this one up and running. I think we should be fairly good. Like I said, you might have a swimmingly smooth experience doing this. More than me. But I listed some of the experience issues that I've had here. So this one here, is all good and is set as a parent.
So we'll just try and resolve what's going on with this one here, which I'm not really sure why it is unhappy. But we'll probably just have to readopt this one. Here. So, this is the one with the MAC address of 9E2C.
So let's just remove that one from here as a controller and we'll just go reset it. Let me just go reset that one and I will come back, and let you know once I've got this last one online. Okay. So just after a hard reset and a reboot. Now I've got this second one back. I'm just going to hit this to adopt. Hopefully it won't break the controller and then this will one come back again as another bridge item, and we're just going to be able to set this one as a child to the parent.
And then they should actually pair up with each other. and I can actually disconnect the cable from the device. And that will actually show us it all working. So, you can see it quite quickly in this instance goes to getting ready.
Once this is done, we will be able to choose the child device. At the moment, it's only got the AC Pro in there. It did seem to take a little while than it did last time till I could find the other one showing up in here. But we'll just see what it does once this has got ready to work.
And then hopefully we'll be able to join those up together. So we'll just give it a few more minutes to just get itself in place and I'll come back again in a moment. All right. So just give it a couple of minutes once it had powered up, and then you should be able to go to the device that you want to be the child. You can change it to child and you should find that you have the other UDB-Pro in there. Now, this didn't appear for maybe about 1 or 2 minutes after everything came online.
But then it was good. I'm just going to turn the PoE off on that one on the past report, because I'll be attaching a laptop to it later on, as a test. All right. And now, basically, I am just going to watch and see...
The lights should come on of these devices very shortly. And then they should actually connect with each other. So, once we see that starting to happen, I can take the Ethernet cable out of the bottom of this second unit so that we don't have a loop. But when I watched this before, it seemed to disconnect itself from the LAN interface once it was ready to go.
So we didn't see I didn't see a loop when I was testing this, but let's just see what actually happens in a moment, once this says that it's getting itself ready. When I saw this last time, I saw the lights on the outside of the unit actually start to change, and it took maybe another 2 or 3 minutes for it actually to find that device and synchronise with it. But I'm obviously assuming at the moment it's picking up its settings. So let's just see what happens with this. I can't remember whether it didn't see this unit or it becomes a single unit.
So I've got a white flashing light on it now, which sort of shows that it's maybe trying to see if it can connect up to the other unit. So all the lights have actually come on the top of the unit now. I'll grab some footage in a moment. So I'm just going to disconnect the LAN cable from the Ethernet from the PoE injector. Which is what I've just done. Let me show you a couple of footage of what shows on the top of both of these which we can And then I'm going to be able to connect my laptop up, and we can just do a speed test between the two of them.
Okay, so you can see here everything is running as it should be. You can see this one is actually connected to the UDB-Pro. And if we actually clicked on this, we can see our signal strength, because they're very close together, is really good. And we can see how long they've been online. And again, we've just got our options here for the Pro. And if we go over here, we can again see what is set up. Now, you might be able to do something with this,
like I said, for a better throughput. I'm not really worrying about that at this moment in time. I just want to prove that this actually works. So let's just connect on over to the laptop, which I've connected to the second port of the one at the end of the bridge. So the one that's connected wirelessly.
Let's just do our speed test here. So there we go. We're getting 3 or 400 meg a second, quite comfortably, there across the bridge. There is a sort of tendency in me to try and see what happens now if we increase the speed of the bridge. Last time I did this, if things go a little, went a little bit messy.
So let's just do this anyway and let's see what happens. So, I'm just going to change the bandwidth here. The channel width to 80.
I just want to see whether anything falls offline and breaks, or whether it actually all keeps its connection happy. The first one is saying it's getting ready. So let's see what happens. This is still getting ready. It'd be nice to see whether we could get a faster speed. I'm not probably expecting it, but you never know.
We might get a faster link speed, so we might get up to 800 meg a second. The second device is now gone offline. Which is what we saw last time and then didn't come back online very happily. So let's just see, what actually happens. All right.
My laptop has lost its session, which sort of is to be expected. And then I'm sort of waiting to see whether this will actually come back online. I've sort of.
There's something in me that suggests that it possibly won't. But let's just wait and see what happens. I'll just give it a couple more moments. If it doesn't, I will probably have to restart both of these, but I just want to see till this one says it's actually got ready. I'd be a bit annoyed if just changing to the channel width here would actually cause us the issue that we are having. Generally, we've got other vendors that will happily go like this, but changing this can cause it to renegotiate a little bit of time.
And sometimes that is related. Oh, no, it has
2024-12-25 19:20
