Ubiquiti

Ubiquiti Unifi Site Magic

Site Magic



I was going to write a long article about the Site Magic feature on the Unifi Gateway devices. But I can't. And the reason is particularly rare and satisfying. If you are using this product for what it is designed and marketed to do.

It is easy to set up

It just works.


So if you want to

Allow full connection between two or more non-overlapping networks located behind Ubiquiti Unifi gateways


and provided

At least one those gateways having a public IP address

The gateways have a communication path between them

Don't need to deal with more than 5 gateways (apparently this limit will change)


A half dozen mouse clicks will get the job done. So far it seems to manage IP address changes and restore itself after network loss with no intervention and has replaced a rather complex IPSec VPN setup.

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Do not use a cannon to kill a mosquito

Some time ago I installed a series of IP cameras to keep an eye on the horses at the farm. With the dodgy power, the sometimes less than stellar performance of the IP link to the farm (it is a long radio link) and the generally poor firmware found on domestic IP cameras, it is not a rare event that that the cameras lock up and need a power cycle.

My original plan for fixing the issue was to install an Arduino with an Ethernet driving a relay and have a Nagios event handler tell the Arduino to bounce the relay. I already use something like this to help fix the WiMAX radio link when it gets confused. Reducing the number of calls I make to my saintly mother-in-law and brother-in-law to help bring the link back up.

After a face-palm moment I realised I was over engineering this problem and already had a piece of equipment that gave 90% of the solution - a ToughSwitch POE. This PoE switch has a watchdog facility that reboots devices if they fail to ping for a sufficiently long period of time - I deployed this device to control my outdoor APs in November of 2013 to great success. All that was needed was to make the cameras PoE devices ...
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Ubiquiti UniFi

My venerable Airport Extreme base stations at the farm with Ubiquiti Networks (www.ubnt.com) UniFi APs and UniFi AP outdoor. This is a fairly challenging environment for a WiFi network as the house is constructed with Hebel (reinforced foamed concrete) and a number of tin sheds. Read More...