Hi everybody and welcome to another video episode of Bernardo's tech blog.
Today I'm gonna be unboxing and setting up my new access point.
This is a UniFi Long Rang access point from Ubuquiti.
I'm setting this access point up for my home use but I hope also to purchase one or several
of these for my place of employment.
At work we've been using some Linksys and Cisco Small Business access points and I've
been somewhat disappointed in their reliability.
So I'm gonna give this a try here and if it works out well I'll likely buy some for at
work as well.
There's not a whole lot of information on the back of the box.
There's a few screen shots of the controller software that's used to configure the access
point or monitor its status.
We see that it supports Wireless B, Wireless G, and Wireless N. It supports speeds of up
300 Megabits per second and links up to 200 meters or 600 feet.
And with that, lets go ahead and look inside.
Right here we have the unit itself.
It looks somewhat like an oversize smoke alarm.
There's an LED ring on the front of it.
On the back we see there's a plate here that's used for wall mounting and there's a network
jack here and also a recessed button which is probably a reset button.
Notice we don't need a power connection because it will use power over ethernet which we'll
explain later.
And here's a quick start guide and a software CD.
Here's a metal bracket and I believe this is probably for use if you want to mount this
on a suspended ceiling.
You put the bracket above the ceiling and the access point bolts on below.
Here's a few screws to help you with the mounting process.
And lastly we have here the power adapter.
Now, this plugs into the wall and then on the other end you plug the access point into
the power over Ethernet side, abbreviated by PoE, and then the other side is where you
plug in your switch or router and basically what this does is inject power into the network
cable so that provides power to the access point and its nice because you don't have
to have a power cable running all the way to the access point.
The Ethernet cable can carry that for you.
This, I am told is not a standard power over Ethernet device and so you must use this proprietary
adapter as opposed to simply using a standard power over Ethernet switch.
It remains to be seen whether that's a problem - as long as you can get these adapters if
they happen to fail - as long as they're available I don't have too much problem with it being
proprietary rather than standard.
Already, I'm gonna go ahead and set this up.
First I'm gonna go ahead and plug a network cable into the LAN side of the power adapter.
The other end of this cable is plugged into my switch back in my network closet.
Now I'm gonna take a second cable and plug it into the PoE side - for power over Ethernet.
The other end of that cable then I'm gonna plug into the access point itself.
And then lastly I'll go ahead and plug the power adapter into the power cord.
Now here we see a light on the adapter to indicate that it's receiving power from the
wall.
The LED ring will light up in an amber color and it will be blinking.
That tells us that it is currently starting up or going through its boot up process.
Now in a few minutes this light will quit blinking but will just remain solid amber
and that means that its started up but it hasn't been configured yet.
Once we use the software to configure it, then it will turn green and stay solid green.
To configure it, you need to download the software from the Internet or install it from
the CD.
I chose to get it from the Internet to make sure I had the latest version.
I'm not going to cover the process of doing that.
This assumes that you know how to download and install software.
Once you do that, you click on the icon on the desktop and it will start the UniFi controller.
And it takes just a bit to go through the initialization process.
Once that is done you'll have a button that allows you to launch your default web browser
and automatically connects to the controllers and allows you to configure that access point.
I'm just gonna hit next to accept the defaults on the first screen and we notice it also
identifies the access point - it finds it on the network and so I'll hit next.
And here's where I'll select SSID or the wireless network name that will be displayed when someone
sees the network.
And for that I'll just use Bernardo1 and I'll use Bernardo1 for the wireless password as
well.
Now next it's going to ask an administrator username and password and this is what you'll
use to actually connect to the controller software in the future to configure it further.
And now that this wizard is done it takes me to the login screen of the controllers
and there I'll enter the username and password that I just created.
And with that I can launch the controller.
Now the basic setup is done but there a lot you can do with the controller software.
It has a map - obviously this is just a sample map but you actually upload a diagram of the
building or buildings where these will be installed.
The beauty of this controller software is it is not just for one access point you can
actually have hundreds of them and control them all from the same interface and make
changes that apply to all of them.
So it makes it much easier if you're handling a lot of them.
It also gives you a lot of information like the current access points, the current bandwidth
that is being used, what users are on, and lots of other information that a lot of times
is not available with the lower-end access points.
Another nice thing about this is that the controller is software based as opposed to
a piece of hardware that you slide into your network rack.
I know there's probably different opinions on this.
I like the fact that it is a software controller because that way if the piece of hardware
fails that it is running on I can easily move it to another one and not have to mess with
buying a new hardware and waiting for it to arrive.
So that's pretty much it.
If you have any questions leave the in the comments.
I'll try to answer them as best I can.
As always thanks for watching, and I'll see you next time!