The 3rd Return from Being Offline

The 3rd Return from Being Offline

... and we're back !!!

Today just so happened to be a standard month of setting-up shop in the new digs. Most of the boxes have been unpacked except for the holiday stuff. I don't think we knew how much decorations we'd amassed over the years and that already included having gotten rid of all the almost decade old disintegrating stuff (which had actually been great for Halloween, by the way).

The only ISP offering fiber in my area had already installed their hardware before we moved in by drilling a hole through brick straight into the middle of the living room wall which limited my options unless I wanted to make another one to feed out from the ONT modem onto CAT6A. As much as I would have loved to forego a separate server room it felt like a blessing of silence when the Mikrotik router was turned off.

And what did it take for me to do that?

I was hoping you'd ask. But first, here's my server rack hastily recreated in the garage just to get this blog back up and running:

Yes, I know, all those spaghetti cables!

What you don't see is a CAT6A shielded cable snaking 60-feet across open ground from the living room through brick. Instead, there's a black CAT6 cable coming from the UniFi 60W switch down-linked from the PoE injector of the UniFi NanoHD access point into the Mikrotik CRS328-24P-4S+RM switch. Apparently, this works via the magic of how UniFi configures Wi-Fi meshing on access points at the moment and it results in what would have been just power to instead the AP becoming a network media bridge.

I'm not going to complain, the alternative is to pre-order the recently announced official UniFi Bridge, which is currently out of stock. I'm probably still going to order one when it becomes available given some network stability due to the signal having to travel through layers of brick to the detached garage. Or ... I might just consider some kind of upgrade to WiFi 6E/7.

It is pretty interesting starting from scratch. I am now realizing that I had over-engineered (of course!) last time by surrounding all corners of the house with access points, even if I did turn down their transmit signals. This sort of explains why all my IoT devices still preferred to connect to the Unifi 6 Mesh that I'd placed on the roof rather than the nearest access point. So, really, in terms of access point coverage less is more and only add if you really must.

In my next post I'll talk about my experience with finally getting a real UniFi Gateway and the status of the rest of the gear in the rack as a result of that network hardware change.

Until then, Happy New Year of the "Dragon"!