 I'm here for more systems, and we're going to talk about the problem with Unify specifically related to this new 6th version of the Unify controller software and We're going to do a little lab demo here breaking down You know the things I have here I'll walk you through this lab demo and it's also part of a scenario that Apparently some people had some problems with with the update That's kind of want to dive into is a play with some real-world technology here and show it working on the new controller Also, why I'm not ready to upgrade to the new controller, but maybe if you did upgrade and you didn't have problems You should stay on it. So too long didn't watch you don't want to go to the end of this video So far it seems that if people have upgraded and don't have problems. It's probably we're staying on the controller What happens if you upgrade and you have one of these scenarios? Well, it seems to be certain edge cases that break and that's kind of the problem with Unify But the problem is not really with Unify The problem might be with who Unify sells to and I'll dive into expanding on that here in the beginning And then we'll jump to the lab and I'll leave time stamps so you can skip around and not listen to me babble and get to the lab Part of that's all you're interested in or if you weren't interested any further you could have clicked already away All right, if you can click the like button though and first if you'd like to learn more about me and my company head over To laurencesystems.com if you'd like to hire short project there's a hires button right at the top if you'd like to help Keep this channel sponsor-free and thank you to everyone who already has there is a join button here for YouTube and a patreon page Your support is greatly appreciated if you're looking for deals or discounts on products and services We offer on this channel check out the affiliate links down below They're in the description of all of our videos including a link to our shirt store We have a wide variety of shirts that we sell and new designs come out. Well randomly So check back frequently and finally our forums forums.laurencesystems.com is where you can have a more in-depth discussion About this video and other tech topics you've seen on this channel now back to our content We'll start right here and for some people this is where all the trouble began well more specifically with six point zero two zero Which quickly turned into six point zero two two as of September 19th, 2020 I do know there are some release candidates available, but not really relevant to this particular video I'm gonna be doing this on six point o two two because that's currently what the controller I have set up is running and what it wants to update to I'm not getting prompted for any other updates But I'm aware of release candidates coming down the pipe to solve more problems but this issue is a lot bigger than this and that's the first thing I want to address and It's probably partly related to this type of scenario right here This is a scenario. I'm gonna walk through a little later in a video They said leaves timestamps, but this is not scenario. We usually set up So we haven't really experienced this problem and the bigger issue with ubiquity One they have a niche market their niche market is a little bit of interest Because they offer a controller that you can host that does things. Well kind of at scale Some people can split hairs all day and say well It's not really enterprise because home users can get to it and I especially know a lot of people in the business arena Who really dislike anything home users have access to they are absolutely? Head strong on they only will buy products that are channel partner only and keep The general public away from it because I can't sell any product and this is a quote I've heard from more than one IT person or IT company. I won't sell any product people can find the price on They want channel partner only they're used to high margin markups, etc. Etc. This is what made ubiquity disruptive in the market. They're going. Hey, I'll sell it to people who are installers I'll even sell it to anyone who wants to go on Amazon and get a link. I'll put the prices right on unify dot-com and or ui.com now and Sell it directly to end users home users anyone who wants to buy our product can buy it and this is not the way of Large commercial companies their use is finding channel partners and value-added resellers who add very little value is Generally my consensus for dealing with a lot of them over the years and my 20 plus years in IT here and I've always liked when products have a Easier sales model and that is a good thing in the big picture But when it comes to doing support and when it comes to dealing with problems, it can be a bad thing I have worked with vendors. I have worked with companies that sell channel partner direct So few people have access to this when you start talking about I say few it's still millions But when a product line has a problem, you're not going to see it in mass Why it wasn't sold to the masses the masses that may be using set equipment And I'm not going to pick out in any particular vendor except for one Microsoft and We deal all the time with updates coming from Microsoft that didn't go well That's pretty much a regular process since Windows 10 came out hell even longer before that We've seen just you know poor quality control and updates and things like that that same type of behavior occurs Repeatedly in the IT world updates are hard solving these problems are hard writing code not easy And sometimes it's poorly managed on top of being difficult we have some poor management decisions being made by people who control the programmers and they push things out and People who work in corporators nodding their head. Oh, yeah I remember when they told me to push that update even though I you know 20 of the other people are going don't do it don't do it But some sales guy wanted to meet a deadline that he promised to a client so we pushed it out and the world lit up on fire But you're not going to hear about is much of the channel partner directs They usually have more private forums you usually just even if they have forums at all There's certainly not public-facing most of the time You'll end up with just a lot of people who call and complain to the vendor that pushed the update And this goes, you know, I well I pick out one more vendor 40 next I've done some videos about them They've had some egregiously bad coding problems on there, but most home users Almost no home users are running out and buying a bunch of 40 net equipment to build out their network at home That's where you big witty has a problem because they have sold to these individuals and there is a lot of them They make a substantially more noise than There's problem So what looks like a small problem when you look at the scale and scope and size of ubiquity as a company in a Number of units they deployed you'll see that people are just ranting and raving But then you start doing a count and this is where you need that other side of the number and The other side of the number is if there's you know two million three million units out there Broke down between some number of users what percentage of those users are really having a problem I mean Riley actually talked about this and even he said out of the you know massive things he hosted hostify the number of problems from some of the updates were Definitely terrible for the people that experienced them But as a percentage of the deployments as a whole it was not a hundred percent it's not like a hundred percent everybody had problems so it's not like the entire update went wrong and What happens is you see the noise because the people that pressed update and said no I worked and they didn't even bother going to The forums an update came through the update went through They never even looked at the forums. You don't have their voices in here So unless you can get a concise and just doesn't work that way But this pretend we can get this analytical data that precisely We can get all the users who installed it 100% of them and report back and then we figure out what percentage Had a problem then we would have a real number. I mean I won't lie There's plenty of comments on this post that tell me people had problems and problems need to be addressed. I'm not Dismissing it. I'm trying to let people think about this from a rational business standpoint And I've done this even with my staff many many times where we walk through scenarios where they start complaining about a particular product and Hard drives are an easy example of that. They'll go man. This particular insert name a brand is a really bad terrible hard drive etc etc But do you know how many of those were installed in the field? And that's where the numbers become interesting because if you say this hard drive was bad But 90% of systems because they were a good price Put those hard drives in because they were the best deal for OEMs to buy Well, the course are going to go bad if there's not another one out there So as hard drives go bad, which they do sometimes There's not other brands that people chose. They all chose this brand So now in this is why like back plays for hard drives that you need to know how many total hard drives were there Well, that's the not the side you know You only know people who had a problem because they brought it into the store and said I need this fixed Or you've seen it out in the field and go well, I see all these fix But yeah, what's your basis of comparison? This is where statistics are really hard and people can easily manipulate those stats to kind of, you know Massage data the way they want but back to my point and my whole ramble about this I don't think it's time to throw away ubiquity. I see people going. This is the end of the company I'm switching and tearing everything out and you know, we've been using these we have these deployed. I'm Myself not exactly thrilled with this update and I'm gonna hold off on it Until I have more data available to me and you know discuss with people some of these scenarios But I will admit this is just one of those real big challenges with ubiquity is when you sell things to a mass market now Other side of this we do a lot of consulting and you know I had the little spiel where I say hire us one of the things people hire us a lot a whole lot for is setting up unify networks and Troubleshooting them and they are always super angry that unified support did not give them the help They needed after buying the product we don't find the product to be at fault as often as we find a misconfiguration A loop in the network with people not turning spanning tree or people and this is the other side of unify when you hand it to end users People turn off auto because they know better So they start tweaking every little setting in there and sometimes it's easier to start over because they don't even you know They're not used to doing it works. So they're not documenting and journaling. All right These are the changes I made in case they need to revert changes. So That's my bigger complaint so to speak that the noise and people will listen to the noise and react to the noise as opposed to Taking a concise look at it now the other side of it. What's important about concise looks at it This is a community unified develops this they give out software. This is not something There's another I can't get you a long list of companies that compete with unify They give you self-hosted controllers because there's really not that many at all that I'm even aware of here in 2020 And I bring that up because hey if you are an innovative developer and you have some money and you can Compete with ubiquity you'd like to do a self-hosted controller and copy the unified business model I'd be excited to talk to about that product, but I don't know that any of those people in That brings us to you know when you give all these knobs and things that people and end users can turn that aren't used to Dealing with this equipment, but I'm not discouraging to do it Please this is how you learn but just don't separate the product and the noise or do separate I should say the product and the noise so you can understand to get concise and then contribute back to Unifying some meaningful way. I know they do not listen to the users as much as they should or could But at least if we start putting this information out there we can work as a community to get this better This is something I try to do a lot of and that's why at the end of this video Well after I'm done rambling here I'm getting to the lab portionist video to play out a scenario and show how it works and talk about some of the problems that Someone in this is information from hostify that they gave me of what troubleshooting He did and just walking through that scenario So that's my rant about Unify. That's my rant about the end user community Which is like I said, I don't hate people or have any problem with the noobs or however You want to look at over the new people getting out into network engineering I'm happy that Unify still continues to sell product It's very affordable for home users and kind of dive into networking you start building labs and things like that It is unfortunate though when these updates don't go quite as planned So that's my end of rant not unless start talk about the lab in a scenario. I have set up here And we'll start right here with the Unify controller version This is six point zero point two two zero and I know like I said, there's release candidates coming up I don't have the time to load those right now We're just gonna do it with what is currently available and more bugs may be fixed I know there's still some random issues that are being experienced and they've got them documented here known issues VLANs beyond UAP wireless Downlakes may have connectivity under investigation So may not and this is actually the part we're going to talk about because I'm actually showing connectivity here But we'll talk about some of the scenarios that may lead to no connectivity. All right So there's that and we do have the map right here set up and the map part of the reason You see two of these there's only going to be one in here and the reason for only having one is I was moving things back and forth in the ports here. Just FYI. So this is our USG 16 XG then we have a unified nano HD and a unified nano HD and this dots here represent them connected Widely together then we have the USW light 16 PoE and we have pop top 480 is my laptop happens to be connected to it Now we'll go over here to draw.io and get you a little bit better idea what we have going on here So the internet comes in and goes to this little SG 2100 I have sitting here. We create some Networks which one VLAN and we'll show that in a second here But we just basically created one network with LAN and one extra VLAN called VLAN one two three And this comes out of here and goes into the XG6 PoE Then we go over here and power up a nano HD and then across here We have the unified nano HD and then we have it plugged into the Unify switch light PoE that also powers this particular nano and then we have right here my laptop plugged into port 2 Which we have set to VLAN one two three and this is where I found it kind of interesting for the Arata where it says VLAN beyond UAP wireless So unified access wireless point downlinks may not have connectivity under investigation Now hopefully and maybe even some from Unify watches this video and this is where scenario testing is really hard This is documented from them that they know there's an issue and they've got updates coming And now let's look at the settings here. So we'll go over here. We'll get wireless networks There's our Not the wireless one doesn't really matter for what we're testing here We have our LAN native 1 9 2 1 6 8 1 We have VLAN only set up and it's VLAN tag ID 1 2 3 now We're gonna take a look over here at PF since now. Here's the internet coming in over here This is our little lab demo network Then we have our LAN which is technically VLAN 0 but 1 9 2 1 6 8 1 dot 1 then we have VLAN 1 2 3 Which is 1 9 2 1 6 8 1 2 3 and then we'll go to interfaces assignments Go over to VLAN's and you can see I've had VLAN tag 1 2 3 so really straightforward I just created a wide open network. We're not dealing with any rules Just basically so I can route traffic off VLAN 1 2 3 I then Defined it right here in the Unify and they pushed out the network now a couple other notices here is the way The wireless bridging works now This is where the scenario gets to be something we usually don't set up You have this unify nano and we have another unify nano and we're actually bridging them together by turning on the ability to Have them talk to each other when you go here You're gonna go to wireless up links and this is off by default You just put the little thing to click the click the box and apply and it turns it on allow meshing to another access point Now allow meshing to another access point and why I don't usually use this people ask this all the question I think a lot of people click that because they think meshing Enroaming are the same thing that is one of the most common things I watch people conflate when they're asking us network engineering question is Well, I need them all to mesh so I can just roam from one end of the building to other And I've heard of that exact sentence more than once I've seen it typed in forms What people are conflating is they think they have to turn that on in order for this to be a one end of the building This would be another end of the building and for them to wander with a device to Connect to one and when it gets to the other it goes over the other You know if I does that by default and the reason we don't use this type of scenario very often It's because what what you're doing when you do this is you're Telling these two devices to talk to each other to get the data over here So the data starts with my SG 2100 and is XG 6 PoE and then we don't have a connection to this device So when you tell them to wirelessly bridge to each other it'll Carry on the data now. I want to talk about scenario and why we don't like this You now have to take and convert this cable right here to from Cable to wireless wireless grab a couple of the antennas available for backhaul Convert them to wireless over here convert them back over here bridge them carry all the VLAN traffic and now go back And forth while it's also providing wireless. It's actually great that unify does this This is great scenario if you're in a pinch and you're going I don't have any way to get a cable from here to here But the devices are within range of each other to talk But that range obviously because it's wireless is very subject to interference. So anything in between these two Well, that's gonna cause latency and problems with this over here So anything that disrupts that connection caused the problem This one of the reasons if we're deploying it in a business just because some things at the far end of the warehouse Doesn't mean well, you know, we can hop these a few meshes over that would be a problematic design because usually customers want extreme stability We will wire every one of them and people are saying well, what do you do when a switch is, you know So many meters away that it exceeds the distance of the cabling Well, that's when we put fiber lines in or do some other methodology of extending it Or we build site to site bridges that are very dedicated and you do your due diligence to make sure these are focused So this is not a scenario we use a lot But a lot of home users it turns out do use this and a lot of people in these edge cases were the ones affected by this Now this comes back to why the testing is so challenging So we have this scenario and set up and one thing I'll admit so far with the unify six If you didn't notice this already and why I went to draw.io this tool here to draw this out Do you notice what's missing is it doesn't seem to know that this unify nano is connected to this USW light And I'm not really sure why it realizes this nano talks to this nano But it kind of mystery floats this one here going I don't know how the internet gets there, but it's on my device list guys So the unify mapping software You know that that means there's a problem with the way it runs But this is something I didn't notice right away with the unify six Normally things on the other side of the wireless bridge show that way, but this one's not That was interesting or at least I don't look at this map very often But I do recall at some point it used to work. I don't know what version if it's been broke for a while I made out of notice because like I said, I don't use it all the time But because we don't usually use a scenario, this is not one when we dealt with people who upgraded they had a problem And this is put a lot of people Seemed to have a problem that they went from five to six But one of my points of building this was to show that despite the unify Mentioning vlan span UAP not working and let's go back over here. We're gonna look at the device We'll look at the unify switch here and we look at what ports I have on here So we've got port to name port to didn't rename it test and the profile test And what does that actually mean? So let's actually edit that port We'll click edit on this. There's my test 123 vlan that I have tagged to this port So all is what comes down the ports all traffic comes to the ports, but we've trunked it down to vlan 123 So what ip address did my laptop get because if you notice up here, I got the little thing So let's see what ip address I got and we'll clear it to show this again To make someone happy that it wasn't statically sitting here, but 192 168 123 dot 100 simple as that So despite unify having it and saying it's under investigation This is also why it's under investigation and kind of back to my ramble a little bit We know some people are having the problem We actually worked riley had worked specifically at hostify. He had helped a client troubleshoot this scenario Now we set it up in a lab and it worked and I don't recall exactly what they had done It was based on a reddit post and you can go in reddit and find where people sometimes just Readopted things and it just started working. This is also what makes it so challenging from a developer standpoint And why it's so hard work doing development is going well the developers and or even people like me We labbed it out. I can't reproduce the problem. That doesn't mean the problem doesn't exist But without knowing the exact scenario that produced it. Um, I don't know now granted We also did not start at controller 5 build this out and upgrade to 6 at some point I only have a finite amount of time. I didn't have time to do all that But I wanted to test this particular scenario and putting vlands across of a wireless bridge Because I was told in or at least seen forum posts where this didn't work So we wanted to test this out and We did find out it did work now If there's more interest in me doing more lab videos like this Let me know because they're kind of fun to do when I have time to do them But you know, this is a pretty easy scenario to set up where you do the bridging and set these up But like I said, this is more like an edge case and not something we actively deploy So these lab ones are less about deployment. So it was one more to say what's the long term stability of it Well, based on version 6, um, certainly there's some issues and upgrades for it But I don't know I don't know what problems people run into because Meshing these together is to me a really cool feature to solve an edge case But our goal is always to hardline every single one of these to get a full connectivity for the best bandwidth possible And the least chances for interference that way every device has essentially what we call to like a home run back to the switch and You don't want the switches to try to keep bridging across especially when I've done, you know Jobs that have 100 to 200 to 300 of these access points out there You can imagine just turning on lots of bridging on there was definitely Challenging now I will admit 6.0 to 0 and I commented on any other video Um, apparently somehow that got turned on and one of the interesting things is right now and we'll test this real quick We will move this cable over To here and then we're going to take this one Out of my laptop and all they did was I'm going from here and we're going to go Let's break the bridge. We'll not break it. We're leaving the bridge enabled But technically if these two are bridged And this is now essentially, you know connected there I should have a crazy broadcast storm going because I've now looped it Now it does have spanning tree in it. So that's supposed to prevent that But I know in 6.0 to 0 this was one of the problems people had was people who did do The essentially, you know home run where you run each one of these to a switch But then had that enabled so they would turn mesh on They would just go into a loop of broadcast storm and that was one of the original challenges people had So at least that seems to have been dressed in a 6.0 to 2 But I'm not sure why people had that turned on I didn't try but a couple things and so far when we've seen some of the updates it didn't turn it on So it leads me to believe some people may have had it on and we had it off So we just don't turn that feature on unless it's absolutely necessary for a client and like I said, we just don't use it that often so it's less of an issue but If we go over here After we refreshed a page in a few seconds here instead of saying connected wireless It's going to say just connected and it'll you know establish a connection on the back end. That's what we're doing here. Hey look and Now it understands that even though this one is still showing connected this now we can see that this is connected here And I'm getting routes over here. So yeah Yeah, and I I don't know how long it'll take before it switches and decides. Oh, yeah, by the way That's connected hard line over there, but it's starting to update and do that But I'm also not Facing a spanning tree problem or anything else that's working properly now granted I set this up from scratch. I did not import just like I said from five So those are my thoughts on the new version of the unify software that challenges with software development The challenges when you have something you sell to a mass audience But I still don't get me wrong Unify needs to do better and if there was more competition in the market, they would almost be forced to Um, this is that big challenge we have because I know people common forum question every time there's a problem Unify people start hammering out. Well, who's the best unified competitor that lets me self host my controller? I'm like I don't really have an easy answer for that who's got a well developed product I'm not seeing there's nothing out there But I haven't seen anything quite as well developed as ubiquity the downside of a product like this also comes from It's complicated. There's a lot of coding that goes into this and uh, they're going to have to make some decisions that unify to Kill some of the noise by making a product a little bit better and maybe spend some more Hire some more engineers, which are really in short supply. So if you're thinking about diving into Uh, coding and network engineering, which is this is basically a collision of um, that's not easy Because people who do code net doesn't necessarily mean they were natively network engineers So, uh, I look at the challenges of writing it's going. Yeah, that's going to be challenging There's usually network engineering teams and there might be a programming team But you kind of got to be both the right, uh network software It's not easy not that that gives them a free pass just to make updates that are kind of willy-nilly and they could always be more transparent So, um, that's my thoughts on it. I'm trying to be as rational as possible I'm not ready to throw out unifying when I keep using your product and keep doing videos like this and keep You know posting and sharing community information of anything I can because you know We know some of the people from unify whether their management or not are listening and maybe they look at it and they go Hey, let's uh, that's a neat scenario. Let's uh play this out differently and go from there So keep posting to forums. Um, just be more rational and show you log files. That's another one. Just don't say it don't work that is That's a big problem if you can show log files and document it better that helps us and people like myself who troubles you Things a lot more and especially people who write this software troubles you to more. All right. 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