 Tom here from Lawrence Systems and we're going to talk about Unify Mesh. So if you want to learn more about me or my company head over to LawrenceSystems.com. If you'd like to hire us for a project including network design, there's a hires button up at the top. If you want to support this channel out in other ways, there's affiliate links down below to get you deals and discounts from products and services you talk about a channel including shirts. People ask where do you get those shirts from Tom and any of the shirts we wear, well not all of them but a lot of them we do upload the designs and they are available for purchase online. So Unify Nano HD right here and wireless uplinking or meshing is a feature built into the Unify system. Unify configuring wireless uplink. They have a whole help article here. This help article kind of explains what the wireless uplinking is. So here would be your Unify base AP and here's the different down links. So one of them does have a direct connection to a switch but the down links are wirelessly meshed together with this one here. Now sometimes people conflate mesh with the ability to roam between networks and by default when you set up a Unify and set up the controller and set up all the access points and adopt them to one network and scatter these around the building, you can go from area tier to building and automatically roams between them. That's roaming. Mesh is more what's depicted here where we have powered and we can power a device. We don't have the ability to run a cable to give it backhaul all the way back to a switch. So we wanted to actually use some of the ability it has to connect wirelessly to connect to another wireless device. Now the good and bad, the good solves the problem for sure. The bad, it creates a problem. It creates a little bit of latency and it's going to obviously reduce a little bit of speed because now you're dedicating some of the resources of this particular access point to connecting to another access point. And in the case when you get a couple hops deep, now you've added some latency because you have to convert from a wireless signal to a digital signal inside there that's got to be converted back to a different type of wireless to jump over to the next one and the process repeats with each hop. That's where your latency can come in. But when the goal is connectivity and an example, we just put one of these in a library and due to the budget constraints, they didn't have the ability to run cable to the far ends of this library that was built well about 1950-ish. It was really, really nice architecture and tearing things up in that nice architecture to drill out and run wires wasn't practical. But they had electricity. So all we had to do is exactly like the setup we had right here. We installed some unify access points and in those corners where they needed connectivity so people could send emails or you know use their phones and still maintain wireless throughout the entire building. Those little corner areas, we just put one of these bad boys and plugged it into an existing wall plug. So as you can see, this is only a PoE and a wirelessly uplinked access point. Now there is sometimes some confusion. I think this is ubiquity's fault. They had the mesh models and some confusion was those are the only ones that support it. There's actually quite a few different devices that not only support it, they both also support multi hop wireless uplink. So you can do multi. These ones are your basic ones, but like the AC outdoor. So I've seen some confusion in the naming, but this list right here, and I'll leave links to this help article from Unify and they have how to set it up, how to configure everything, which I'm going to show you how to do as well and some best practices and how to dive into it. What we're going to be doing is making sure that allowing meshing to another access points turned on and that it's turned on in the controller itself. Pretty easy to do. It also, we're not going to use it in this particular video, but it does have this as an option. When you are going and building these, when you're designing a topology, maybe you want it to favor one particular uplink versus the other, and that is a priority that you can set. We only have this one studio demo one we have right here and two other access points in our network here. So I'm just going to let it pick whichever one it wants, but if I wanted to force it to favor one over the other, that is an option that can be set up and it got some other details. They dive into some of the planning processes on how to do this. All right, I'll show you the functionality of it. This is what it looks like when it's connected wirelessly. So we have the new better Wi-Fi. This is just a nano HD mounted in a ceiling that my staff calls new better Wi-Fi. This is the studio table nano HD, the one in front of me right here that's connected wirelessly. So it gives a little dotted link and this is a base station that is over in another area of our office. So it decided that this was the most efficient in which technically it is the closest one. It's only a few feet away. So this is what it connected to. As far as settings go, go over here to the devices and we'll look at the pop this out, go to the config, scroll down and here we go wireless uplink. This is turned on. So allow meshing to another access point that does have to be turned on. I believe it's turned on by default, but we change our network a lot. So I'm not positive, but if it's not, that's all you got to turn it on and then you turn this on. Enable wireless uplink and enable element adoption. Make sure those things are on as well. So how does it actually work? Well, right now we can go over here and pull this one back up and look at the clients. What clients connected? Tom's laptop 3.18. Okay, that's my laptop and that's connected. So we're going to go over here to the terminal and I've SSH'd into this already and all they did was do a mca-dump, pipe, grep, mac and what I did is filter for mac address and you can see which mac addresses of which devices are connected and mine is in that list of what's connected. I just did it from the command line here just to show you that you can because there is a delay in the Unify as you reboot or restart things before the Unify controller, maybe 30, 40 seconds, sometimes a minute before it gathers all the data coming from the devices and updates, but obviously you can SSH in because the devices will be up and running and start connecting clients prior to even the the software getting refreshed. So I just confirming and that's what that command is right there. Now what you're seeing here is wave mod and you can see my association, you can see my mac address here and you can see it ends in .76. So it just matches the mac address that we seen for when we did the mca-dump. So what I wanted to demo is exactly how fast that switching happens both when you have the mesh I'm connected to here and how fast it can roam to the other one. So one, the meshing solved the problem, we have this connectivity and let's say I just didn't have wiring, but what happens when they roam between them because this is good where people kind of conflate this, not fair people say well maybe the Unify doesn't support roaming very well, even in a mesh condition it roams quite well. So what I'll do and I'll have the screen pulled up to show you me doing it at the same time is I'm going to unplug this device, it'll go dark and as soon as it does go dark we'll show how the connectivity works. So you're going to hear a little plug pop out and you're going to watch this blink, blip, connect, done. Now I've not enabled fast roaming or anything special to make that work. This is still the, you know, other than the making sure those options I showed you are on for meshing, this is a default Unify setup for the network. The important part is when it comes to roaming that the devices themselves support it, which is another facet of this. So one, these do kind of solve some of the problems and they will pass back and forth. So as your devices come in and out of here. Now I'm bringing all this up because we've done some of these deployments and we showed one in a large warehouse and how you do that planning is you're going to have a little bit of overlap so you have them all planned out and they can pass between there. But what if some of those areas you have that you want to fill in gaps later but you don't necessarily want to go and run wiring to you can put it in the mesh and it will roam back over to the mesh and you can set the priority of where you want these to mesh back to and that kind of covers some of those gaps. But this is also very dependent on making sure the client can roam back and forth as well. Now as far as you know re-establishing the mesh or anything like that it's just a matter of plugging it back in. There's obviously a notice on the screen over there that the heartbeat was missed and we'll go back over to the Unify controller and everything stays up and running. So the next thing we're going to do is figure out where my laptop wandered over to and do one more little piece of this demo. So right now this is still showing because it hasn't realized because of the timing that this is missing but by the time it realizes missing the data will start coming back and it'll show back up and refresh. But it didn't break any connections on my computer so I'm still perfectly fine. I'm still connected. Everything works perfectly fine on the internet. Let's SSH into something so we can show something actually working. Well actually this did break because I unplugged it so this particular SSH session is definitely dead. But let's SSH into my forums for example so we'll go into something externally and I'll kick off H-Top. So H-Top's up and running and you can see we got a connection here and we're going to go ahead and move my computer to another Wi-Fi so let me figure out which Wi-Fi is it connected to now. It'll take a second and I'll determine it and then we'll move me to the other one by disconnecting or rebooting that particular device. All right we see that the Studio Nano went over here. This one instead of connecting back over here is now on this and my laptop has connected to the new better nano Wi-Fi right here. So what we can do is pull this up, move this over and we'll go ahead and reboot it. So we go over here to the tools, debug terminal, open up a terminal into it and we can close this and just type reboot. Now before I do that you can see H-Top still running. I've been passing between different devices here although I'm physically sitting still because I'm rebooting my Wi-Fis and we're going to go reboot and that should drop the connection right. I probably didn't catch it fast enough but it's already connected over here. Before I can even get to the other screen it's already re-established on one of the other devices and hopped over to there and you can see that even despite me rebooting it I'm still logged in and SSHed into my forums and I have H-Top running and after a few seconds this will refresh. Like I said it takes a second for the Unify system refresh and figure out where things are. This will actually disappear in a second from here and yeah everything works but I didn't lose connection. I'm still here. I'm still connected SSHed into things and one of my points being that yes you can roam between them and when you have a little bit of overlap like we do here the system will choose the strongest but the strongest will be chosen first but if the strongest gets rebooted it'll jump to the next strongest and wander over. My guess would be my laptop probably wandered back over to this one since it rebooted it was connected to the other one. It's kind of a little bit further back and then it decided that I rebooted this one. You can kind of see how all this works in real time and I'm leaving everything at the default settings. There are fine tuning and Unify has some best practice and details you can dive into. Kind of gets you the idea that yes it works. We've done this at scale. We've done this for larger companies and of course it works perfectly fine here in our office and it can work perfectly fine at your house if you you know have these set up across your home network or small office network. If you have questions, comments, concerns, or other forums and we can talk about them in over in depth I'll of course leave a link below to our forums easy enough to find but for those wondering how to set it up it's pretty easy pretty straightforward to do. It's less than ideal. It's usually to solve a problem. It's not that you always want this turned on but it does have the advantage when you have to update something or anything like that. If you do have some overlapping coverage so you can update one, reboot one, and roll through it without having too much disruption to the users that are connected to it it kind of depends on how you have them laid out but if you haven't like I said thoughts, comments, concerns over to forums and thank you and thank you for making it to the end of the video. If you like this video please give it a thumbs up. If you'd like to see more content from the channel hit the subscribe button and hit the bell icon if you like YouTube to notify you when new videos come out. If you'd like to hire us head over to LawrenceSystems.com fill out our contact page and let us know what we can help you with and what projects you'd like us to work together on. 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