Upgrading a Unifi network
Last year I wrote about the pretty complicated, 42 AP and 41 Wifi network residential installation of Ubiquiti Unifi I set up for our building. A couple of months ago we made an upgrade to it. Here’s the summary of that upgrade.
We used to be uplinked with a 100/100 Mbps symmetric fiber link, which for the most part worked fine, but from time to time was overcrowded with too many people trying to stream 4k Netflix at the same time. Our residential company board had the authorization to upgrade it, so we did — to 1 Gbps uplink from the same ISP as before, Suomicom. This meant that some of the original hardware ran out of steam, too.
I got the Unifi Dream Machine Pro (what a name!) to replace the Security Gateway Pro device, which didn’t have enough network capacity to work as the firewall for the faster uplink. UDM also can host the Unifi network controller on its own, so the underpowered Cloud Key could go, as well. We had some building automation network needs, so I also got an extra 48 port Ethernet switch for that side of the network. As before, I’d have to maintain clear network isolation between all apartments, as well as the building automation, so it made sense to keep all in configurable, managed devices.
Once the new hardware arrived, the first task was to wire it up, and the second to transfer the network management to the new core router (UDM). It’s getting fairly crowded in that network cabinet with 90 connected ports and several core network devices! Wiring it up was straightforward enough, but getting it all to fit without first ripping out everything that had already been wired was a job.
Migrating network control from one Unifi controller to another is made easier by the cloud backups in the Unifi software stack. Its not without its glitches, and was complicated by changing not just the controller device but the core router at once. Ultimately the auto-restore and -provisioning did its job, though.
Unifi software is a weird mix. When it works, it’s great, but its also quite buggy. For the first 6 weeks with the new setup, the controller UI would crash and become unreachable about once a week. Happily the network itself stayed online and restarting the controller via ssh login worked each time. The latest OS update entirely crashed the whole network and necessitated an emergency recovery, which was not fun at all while the whole building was offline. It was the second time in 2.5 years the core network went down and those are stressful every time.
While I’ve been involved with fairly large networks before, this is the only one I have managed with this many network devices, and by far the most complicated with all of the apartment-specific private Wifi networks. This is complicated. I have no idea if any other network stack could do any better with this much complexity, so overall, I’m still pretty happy this runs at all while I don’t have to actually do anything to it most months.
As far as our uplink ISP, Suomicom, that part of the solution works great. 1Gbps capacity for a building with 40 apartments is more than plenty, since seldom do everyone need a lot bandwidth at once. Even 100Mbps was enough most times. Over the last couple of months, the most bandwidth I’ve noticed we’re consumed at once was slightly below 200Mbps down for a short period, so there’s little risk we’d run out of capacity anytime soon.
