 All right, I want to take a look today at the Unify controller software now I do add the word software because they just have it listed as like Unify controller and for those of you new to Unify you may not be familiar how the product works you download the controller software so you log into the controller and that's what manages the Wi-Fi devices and several other devices that Unify makes now that's not to be confused with the cloud key which is a controller box that runs the Unify controller in a small miniature device I'll link below to review of that device it's really pretty handy but you can run the controller software on Windows Mac or a Linux distribution such as Debbie and a bunch of our support I imagine there's other ones you can get it running under it just runs in a Java we're gonna cover installing it on Windows because I'm assuming most people are gonna saw them Windows but it's really just as easy to install on Linux as well with Linux it has a couple other add-ons that you have to throw in there but nothing nothing that difficult to set up on there if enough people ask me for it I will make a one how to how to install on Linux as well so I've already downloaded the file and it's the latest one as of today which is March 12th and it's the 2017-8 firmware which is 5.4.11 cloud controller so it was closed this and I've already got it here on a Windows desktop the installer is really straightforward it's mostly just next and yes because you don't really do any settings in this part of it here all the settings come after and you configure everything through a web interface we're gonna go ahead and kick this off and now the screen it's started so this is the unified controller 5.4.11 and you can hit launch browser and it's gonna launch a browser now I don't this is actually running in a virtual machine so I don't really want to launch the browser from inside here so I'm gonna run it externally and I'll show you how I did it's pretty simple so once you have it running on whichever device you have it running on be it Linux be it Windows or be it a Mac you go to the IP address from another browser now if you're on that computer you could do to localhost but we're on another computer so we're gonna go HTTPS the IP address colon 8443 it is important that you put to HTTPS or you'll get the pages and working for invalid response so we go here go ahead and proceed because it's a self-science certificate in here and it's gonna run us through the setup file now you can alternatively restore from backup so if you have a backup of the unified software you can just push that right now and it will grab the old backup and just restore your settings it has the easy way to export which I'll get to that later in the tutorial here next we have one unadopted unify and it wants to know if you want to adopt the same time I plug this in on purpose we have a one we're installing for a client but we're gonna go ahead and adopt it and go ahead and this we have something to test with here we're gonna call it our test network or recall our test Wi-Fi like capitalization and we'll set an arbitrary password we're not gonna worry about guest access admin now you don't recommend using admin I am for tutorial purposes but I usually have a username related to the client and I create different users so we have access and the client has access if they need to for management for now we're just gonna go ahead and create an admin one not gonna bother with it I think I won't let me do it without an email so it will tell you that it's a weaker strong password oh I guess I won't even let me go forward unless I have a strong password so let's make something better fair enough I didn't realize that if you know we usually generally I never try to weak password and quite a few versions I usually use a better password for my clients now this is for your ubiquity accounts you can tie different ones together we're gonna skip that for now as I'm gonna do a separate tutorial on how that works because the cloud access that allows you to manage different accounts is pretty slick but it's a little confusing at first so it's gonna be a separate tutorial so we're not gonna cover that in any of this so it has the information everything that's gonna be in here so we're gonna go ahead and finish and now we log in with the credentials we created and we are in so right now we're only gonna cover the Wi-Fi I'm gonna do another tutorial on like the security gateway but this is a to get it going to show you just how it goes so you can go you the basics of getting it set up so the first thing we're gonna do is we have only two devices one of them we adopted which is this unified outdoor one is managed by other we just have another one a network that we're setting up we're not managing that one so we're going now we can't adopt that one into our network and what you would use is whatever the admin credentials were for that unit but we're not going to so we're not we're not gonna mess with this one at the moment right now so we're just gonna leave it alone and just focus on this one now the first thing you may have noticed is the versions of software pretty outdated so we're gonna go ahead and do an upgrade on it so gonna hit upgrade yes we want to go from version three two to three point seven so we'll let it do this real quick this is gonna take a couple minutes but through the magic of editing it'll only take a few seconds all right so we have the unit now updated and so I can start going through some of the features in here so when you first on a dashboard because we're only covering Wi-Fi today everything else is grayed out except for the WLAN one active device here so all these other features come on and like thorough put is if you have one of the unified security gateway products and it is managed to the software as well so it's only going to give you the information related to the WLAN device is connected to here now for every device you add to the network they get all the same settings pushed to them so if we keep adopting more devices as they go down you would go and see all of them as one single network and the way you manage the networks is all the way down here in these settings so you have the site configuration default site wireless networks and we have one called our test Wi-Fi now if I change this and let's say we had 20 different unified devices attached when we make a change to this and we'll just edit something simple we'll call our Wi-Fi 2 just so we have change name change to it and you'll go over here and let's go back to the dash actually let's go to the devices and you can see it says provisioning over here and what that does is it would pushes pushes this out and we have some sites with like 30 or 40 of these at a time and it staggers it and but it only still only takes a few minutes and it pushes out all those configuration changes across all the unified devices now if you're wondering do these have to be the same devices no you can mix and match all the devices however you want and now it's connected so it doesn't take long at all to do and you don't have to have all the same devices this one particular is an outdoor device but you can mix and match old devices new devices the acs the 5 gigahertz the 2.4 gigahertz and you can set it up as one network I mean there are advanced ways you can say only push this network to this so you can create multiple Wi-Fi networks across the devices but then segment them out generally most people want a unified network that way as you move through your office you can easily go through and just keep connecting and the hand-offs are seamless so let's say you walk from one end of the building on the other and it's a very large building or in our case we do this with some of the factories the network is just universally the same everywhere and if you want to make a change to that network when you provision it it'll do it now there are advanced ways as well you can do this across sites so we have one client that has a unified system in two different locations they're tied together very VPN and we have the unified setup so they call back across the VPN and that's where they get their settings from so they still have only one single server controller now just so you know the controller software does not have to be running for these to function you can you still get the functionality of the unit itself as far as authenticating and allowing Wi-Fi devices to be connected you don't get any other advanced features such as logging because the devices are done but if the software is not running the the unified carries on and keeps working that's an important thing because a few people have been confused by that where they think that the software has to be running all the time it does not so once you're here in the settings and i'll show you how quick it is to create a new wireless network so we'll call it uh another wireless and you can set up you know let's say WPA personal another security key for this one it does support WPA enterprise as well so you could create different authentication methods, radius profiles we're just going to do that and it's nice when you click on it i actually like that it gives you the password i just said something simple like this this makes it really convenient you just don't have to worry about oh no i don't know what the password is so i have to reset it you click on it it'll give you the password there's some advanced options if you're running VLANs it has the option to tag it to a VLAN ID and that is on a per wireless network you create so the first wireless network can be on one VLAN the second wireless next network can be on another VLAN of course you're going to need a switch that supports VLANs but this is really nice that way you could actually run two separate networks on one physical device or more than two networks i think five is what's supported on these right now so you can have multiple networks and then have it going to different VLANs with different network settings uh so based on what you know ssid password combination it puts them on different networks but physically you only have to deploy one device this is a really nice feature i've seen a lot of school districts use this so they have private and public networks and they just have them VLAN uh across there pretty pretty neat uh you have WAN scheduling controls so you can say i only want it to be on during these times which is pretty cool you have some advanced controls which i haven't used much of uh to test them i just leave it here at default uh custom controls like basic or supported for people connecting at different speeds so it's one of those advanced features if you say i only want people that connected this to be able to work on there i've always left that at default and i've never had a problem with it um they like i said these work really flawlessly the WLAN schedule is nice if you have a restaurant but you don't want people sitting in a parking lot afterwards which they've found to be a problem where people come at night sit and download movies so they enable schedules so the wireless network for the guest network or just for the network that they have the customers connecting to they have it turning off and only operates during the restaurant hours depends on how nice you want to be with sharing out all of your network um by default it's WP2 AES but you can make it fall back to the TKIP only if you want so it does have that supported and it does support WPA1 if there's some special use insecure case where you want to do that prevent the SSD from being broadcast that's right there now under the networks once again these settings are always default to the 192.168.1.24 but those networks are only related to the unify security gateway and have no effect on the wi-fi units as you can see the IP address of ours is 3.194 so we have the status led alert emails speed test once again this is part of the unify security gateway so it won't really matter uh it does offer remote syslog servers so so you can do um remote syslogging and uh remote snp and push it out elsewhere you actually these have like an ssh controller in them they're basically really really cut down uh linux boxes that each device itself is which is kind of cool so admins we have me as a super administrator but you can add multiple admins to this that way you can have multiple people managing it that way when you're going through the logs you can determine who did what when maintenance pretty straightforward compact database options historical data retention defaults is disabled we can say we want to keep 30 days of statistics on here uh you can then compact it or does it automatically after so long what levels if you want really high level of logging in there check for firmware updates backup data retention so you can have it uh download so many days when you do the download of the backup download support info and show system config uh you can also restore from here so you can have it uh automatically do restore now it does have a auto backup option so you enable auto backup and you can control the information here pretty straightforward as far as that goes um hotspot part of the upac um i have not messed with any of this so i don't have a lot of information on it and routing and firewall is back to the you know if i security gateway i'm gonna do a separate review on that device the other thing you may want to enable is going to be like this automatic firmware upgrade which is nice because if there's a new firmware and you update the software it's going to automatically just push it to the devices i have this enabled all over the place and knock on wood none of these have failed with any major uh issues or anything with the firmware update i had one that we don't know why it decided it didn't want to take the firmware and it did not load but it also didn't brick uh we reset the device and loaded it and it loaded fine but i mean that's one out of the hundreds of them we've had so i've never never had to return one for uh that issue now the device itself uh we're going to let's just close these windows over here so you double click it you're gonna get this here now configuration i like the fact that you can name them so if you have a whole lot of them uh you can name them so i'm going to put this one next to my desk and hit save and it then now has a name this is really handy so when we do deployments and clients we're going to say front office back office middle office whatever the names of all the devices are we can put them on there and it makes it really easy so you understand which one is which there's also this feature here locate and locate uh is really easy it locates it by making it blink so you can force it to blink on there so you know which one's which so let's say you did a deployment and you don't know which ones which because the previous tech did not label them as he installed them we're dealing with that with a new client we're taking over right now and uh so we're gonna run through and locate them that's a big warehouse with a dozen of them and we don't know which one's which so we just walk around with the laptop login to software hit locate find it give it a name move on to the next one um and for each individual one you can force like very specific settings on it so you can do something custom other than like the defaults network settings that are pushed to all of them and that's where you can do that they even have some custom firmware upgrade options uh so you can do that i'm not i've not tested or even tried to compile custom firmware for the devices it's probably another kind of special use case you can just reboot the units which is kind of cool too now i'm actually going to log in to my unify at home uh that way i can show you some of the statistical information because this is a new one and it just doesn't have much on here so well we'll log in real quick to that one i'm going to obscure the information though for it all right this is my uh unify at home and i can't really show you the client ones because you're just well there's too much going on there with client stuff and we're real strict down privacy so you can see some of the uh current statistics 89.7 gig worth of traffic at my house uh the different clients that are connected and let's actually show you the clients and they are some chromecasts lots of them and the kids phones and things like that uh clearly this is kind of fun stuff i know how long that client's been there so 17 minutes ago emily got home the kindle's been connected for a couple days actually because we had a reboot oh and this is uh emily's boyfriend his phone has connected to 17 minutes ago as well so we can actually track and see what how much data each one of them are using most of the data we're going to see though the larger amounts here are going to be like the chromecast uh and yes my this which connection is my connection at home is called beer that is my wi-fi uh connection so you're looking at the statistics it tells you like most active and i can already tell you this is my uh with 85 gigs down that's the wife who's been watching tv the last couple days and that happens you're going to get a lot of data down watching netflix and things like that in a chromecast you can do different insights into some of the different stuff that's on there showing all the different clients uh nice thing you can do as well if you aren't sure about someone on a network you can just reach up and block that client uh so if you want them off and i can say you know what i just don't want them on or they're using up too much network you just go block and away you go so back to the clients over here you it's pretty straightforward how it all works it gives you some of the history of their connections uh i don't have too much data retention because it's just my home server in just a couple days is fine so it gives a history of them uh one of the neat things you can do is force a specific user onto different units so there's ways you can go through and say okay i want to push this person back over to this unit i mean also use statistics for each one connected so you can see like this up here which is the kindle what speed it's connected at the transmit rate it's connected at the signal strength and that's on a per device so we can go here and let's look at emily's phone again we can see the amount of data we can see the state signal strength um 89 dbm what the transmit rate is like you said this is really neat because when you're trying to do some troubleshooting a wi-fi this just makes it really handy you can go through each one now things like deep packet inspection once again that's related to the unify gateway without those on here we can't see that so and here's the known clients neighboring access point pass connection switch stats it gives you a lot more stuff some of the stuff once again you're only going to get from uh if you have the unify security gateway but here's like the pass connections you can see who's on there neighboring access points there's actually oddly no one with a pushed access point next door but you can see that because the unify will auto switch uh networks as needed and what that does is it's going to switch the networks uh to be the most efficient network so if someone else is on the same channel right next door or within the same zone it can auto switch them and it does this on a per device space it's not per network so if you have a very big building in one side there's an interfering network that's on one channel it doesn't have to be the same channel on the other side it auto scans and auto updates that uh there are alerts there's no alerts in here but you can have alerts for things like uh missing access points this is actually kind of handy so if there's a problem with one of them or it needs to be restarted or or any issues in general or just loses connections with it uh it can then send you alerts to that problem which is kind of neat uh so it says oh you know you drop this wi-fi connection so you know that something happened there uh definitely pretty cool then there's uh device itself i have a unify long range and there's a firmware upgrade accepted the software i didn't update it to the latest version i'm not going to do that right now because they're all using it and it takes a few minutes and then my phone rings because i'm not at home and they're like all the wi-fi is disconnected what are you doing another cool thing is they built in a live chat and support here for the unify so you can contact unify directly get uh you get your support going on it which i think is pretty cool um that they put that in there now i don't have a five-year version i just have the 2.4 so you're not getting anything on this five giga channel but it will break down the devices and how they're connected uh whether it's five gigahertz or if it's on a uh the 2.4s now the last thing i'll show you is the map which is really cool so this is like the default map that they have loaded to the system and you have you can upload your own maps and then you uh get them to scale so let's say uh 10 meters and we're gonna set like this and say maybe this distance is 10 meters set scale now what that does is when we want to do coverage maps you can drag each one of them around and say okay this one and i need coverage over here and over here and over here so when you upload the map you put it to scale now please note this makes zero assumptions about the walls that may be acting uh to block the wi-fi and we've run in some situations where the older houses that we put them in and even older buildings around here in detroit they have a lot of wire mesh in the walls that just kill wi-fi signal and so we've had to put some really relatively close that look like they'd overlap but this gives an estimate now these estimates are also adjusted for based on the type of device this is a long range one so the it's the larger one if there was a smaller wi-fi the non-long range one the heat map would be different for what is doing that now another neat thing about this is when we do maps to buildings for clients we'll draw their building rough it in do a quick map and then we go through and drag these everywhere you want them and then we name them all so you can look at a map now the cool thing is they're not just movable you can adjust them you can click options on them and actually functions from right here so i actually close all this i'll show you what it does so if we click it and we click here it's going to bring up the properties right away of this particular one and right here for example if i want to locate it this is really handy when we're laying things out if i know so where someone's at in the building i'm like okay is it this one we'll click it and one of the guys look up and go oh yeah that one's blinking so we know where it is and it makes a nice plotted map for all of them and once you have it where you want on a map you lock it so you can't accidentally drag it around and you just drag all the other ones to it so this is they it'll list all the unplaced ones and you just pop them around and put them wherever you want in here so the mapping feature is really cool um and really handy because like i said it's really nice and it it's a nice presentation for the client when we hand them a map and say here's all your wi-fi units and here's how it looks inside your software and then they can just tell us which one it is and we can manage a lot of this remotely so definitely just really slick the way that works so like i said that's just the overview of the uh we'll kind of you know taking a look at how this all works in here and whoops i uh accidentally hit update and provisioned it so i'll probably get a phone call in a minute for why is the wi-fi networking um yeah it's uh upgrading so this is a quick look on this if you have questions comments leave them below uh i'm going to do one for the usg as well but i wanted to get this going just to show you you know how the unify works and giving ideas is how the software goes it's really not that hard uh this is one of the reasons the software so popular uh it it's really easy to use and as you can see it's easy to manage see the statistics and uh deploy these especially in groups like 20 30 40 of my time it doesn't really matter you just put the controller in and they all talk to it and away you go so uh once again if you like the content here like and subscribe and thanks for watching