 Tom here from Orange Systems and Unify Controller 6.036 has been out for a few days. Today is November 25th, 2020. And we finally updated to the six version series. Actually, we've been updating some of the clients to it. Some of them, well, updated themselves to it and we've troubleshot some problems. We moved our controller to this and troubleshot some problems. And I want to talk about what those problems you may run into are. And that's what this video is going to be about is, yes, it's probably time to upgrade to it unless you're just one of those people that want to hold out forever. And that's fine too. There's not at this moment any known issues fixed in 6.036 in terms of security that needed to be addressed from the five series. So if you're holding out and waiting a little bit longer, that's fine. But I want to talk about in terms of if you do update what you might run into, what are those edge cases that cause problems, which ones we dealt with. And I did get plenty of input from Riley Chase over at Hostify who discussed this with me as well because he's updated way more controllers than me. I believe he has over 1200 of them right now on the Hostify service. I have a review if you're not familiar with the Hostify service and if you don't want to deal with updates or a great solution because, well, Riley does a great job with Hostify and him and his team. Keep them up to date. Before we dive into the details and talk about the upgrade, let's first. If you'd like to learn more about me or my company, head over to laurancesystem.com. If you'd like to hire a 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. 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I feel as though they've stabilized the problems, they've learned from all the little edge cases and ways people have deployed these that are maybe different than the developers had expected, which caused all these little problems. And very specifically, one of the major problems is if you have WLAN groups, and they're defined differently now, and that did not migrate very well. And let me show you, if we go over here to the wireless settings, what's missing is a little spot right here for defining the WLAN groups. This is what an old controller looked like. Oddly, the demo.ui.com still runs version 5.11. I thought that was interesting. And in the old version, here is the WLAN groupings. This allows you to create a group and then apply that group policy essentially to those access points. So let's say you have a group of them in one area, you can apply a group setting and then group them together to have a common setting and another group for another common setting. And this is good for if you have a single network with maybe 100 access points, we'll just throw a number out there, deployed and you want like 50 of them because they're in one area of a building to have only these SSIDs. But another group of SSIDs or special configuration, you would build them out in these groups. They handle that a lot differently now and the migration from the old version to the new broke a lot of things. The migration seems to work pretty good, but there are some exceptions. And if you do run into problems, all you really have to do is rebuild those groups. Not a major problem, but at least knowing what to do. And the way you do that is we're going to go ahead and edit this. And right here is that AP group name. Now, my site doesn't use any groups. We do have a couple clients and some of them updated their controllers and they have some large groups. Alls we have to do is, well, get rid of the groups and put them back in and that fixed it. And this is where you create the group now. So hit create AP group. I can then put them into this new group that I create and I'm not going to save it and away we go. So this is where most of the problems occurred besides what did occur in the 602.0, which was some weird bridging VLAN, another edge case scenario that I guess didn't always translate. And I wasn't able to reproduce it. I have a lab video I did on that. I wasn't able to reproduce the problem, but it sounds like if you build it new, it doesn't happen. But some migrations had some trouble where if you were bridging two different wireless access points together essentially in a mesh and you had a switch on the other side. So we were using, instead of like a site to site, you were using the devices themselves. Those sometimes have issues. Alls you had to do was reprovision them and it seemed to fix it. It's kind of a weird edge case and it's not something I was able to directly reproduce, but there's been some workarounds for that and it doesn't seem to occur at all in the 603.6 controller. So if you were having those problems and you're still having an upgraded from 602.0, getting the 603.6 should solve any of those issues. Now this is the problem I do have with where they move things around. So I was confused and thought, hey, they've removed and we're gonna go down here to maintenance and right here is log level, support information and firmware. And this is what it looks like on the old controller. Here's those statistics data retention. It is important that you set these so you don't overload the controller when you have a larger site and making sure these are right. This is something that it even warns you in the new version that if you have a cloud key, if you have this set too high to too much data retention, you may overload it. And this can cause some problems if you don't have a controller that can handle the volume of information. And I thought it was odd that it is just missing. This is the new version, but it's not missing. This is where they have slowly moved things into the new interface, but not completely moved things into the new interface. So let me show you. We go over here to try new settings. Here's the new interface. We go down here to system settings. We scroll down, we got maintenance. And there's our statistic retention. It exists in the new settings. It does not exist in the old settings anymore. So my initial confusion was they seem to have removed this and this is kind of a problem. And well, it's not removed, it's just moved. That is one problem. And the next problem is, while we're in the new settings, we're gonna go here to networks. That's all we have defined right here is just this network, but we don't. We go over here to Wi-Fi and it does list my network and what VLAN it's attached to. So this network is native LAN, VLAN 69, IoT and secure. And we're gonna go back over here to system settings and we're going to turn off these new settings, go to apply, go back to here. There's all my networks. So the network groupings, the network and VLAN defining only works in the old interface, but not the new one. But then when we go back over here to wireless networks, they're not displayed right here. But don't worry, I can still create and edit networks. So if I go to edit this network, for example, here we go, I can apply this. Now, another problem you'll have, if you're only running Unify access points and you don't have any other switches and you have defined VLANs, let's say on a different brand switch, but not define them under the network setting, you can't type in the VLAN anymore. That was another problem that was created. So you'll have to go and edit those manually because it doesn't have a way to assign them. Now they are selected and pulled down based on the creation of them here. And I understand why they did this. This is essentially one of the problems we run into where people would go in, create a VLAN and put a different number because of a typo, because of a mistake and have a different number within their network settings versus what they had in the wireless. Now that's not even possible because it has to be chose from a pull down here. And so if you manually put some of these in and didn't define them and you do the upgrade, you'll find those wireless networks may not function. And all you have to do is go create the network with the matching VLAN. Those are the only real major issues we found and we've had a few clients that upgraded some larger sites and not too big of a deal. Now, when it comes to the way they do the wireless groupings, it actually makes a little bit more sense the way they do everything underneath each of the wireless. So if we go here to edit and we wanna create that group so you can still do the groupings and we were still able to fix that for clients that have those larger groups for the way they wanna do things, that worked pretty well. Now the wireless settings are nice the way they look in here. And also I gotta admit when I go back over here to new settings and we're editing the networks over here, they look reasonably nice in here but I still don't have a hundred percent in the new settings. So this is where it gets a little confusing again. I don't think there's anything I need the new settings for except the, when we go to system and that maintenance of adjusting if you need to do any statistics retention changes which happens to be here. That's so far the only thing I think you have to go to the new menu for and of course actually having it displayed right here to show your APs. It's kind of a weird blend to have this mixed at the same time. It's gonna be nice when everything's in one or the other. I'm not completely sold on this new interface. To me, it takes up a lot more space. I like the more condensed version of this. So hopefully they will take some time and look at the UI and I'm gonna switch back to the old one. This is still my preferred way to do it. This just is easier to see everything kind of at a glance. It seems like they would be able to solve this problem but like I said, as they kind of migrate things mixed back and forth. But that's kind of a minor complaint. I had a few people mention that there are some changes in the statistics page. I didn't see anything that was problematic. Someone said there were a few errors but these errors seem to occur when I was pushing out some of the updates. I didn't see anything broken in here and I wasn't 100% clear on some of the complaints people had. Someone else had tagged me on Twitter and didn't like the color change too. So sometimes I have to try to spend time sorting through the noise to make sure I understand what the real problems are. And so far upgrading the sites and the larger clients that we did with some larger sites, it wasn't too bad. I mean, I can't say that the problems were insurmountable or took that much time. Mostly it had to do with just the way that WLAN groupings were. Now we do not have, but we have a handful of USGs but not a lot of them that are out there in a field that clients have deployed. We don't actively deploy them. I've talked about this before because I don't find them to be the most robust or functional when it comes to features but those upgrades have gone as well. Same thing with firmware updates. We've been pushing firmware updates. I think I only have one, yeah, one and two devices left on my network that I haven't pushed firmware updates for and that's all gone really well with the new version. So overall I would say yes, it's probably timed upgrade. I don't really see any more bugs like they had. I mean, there's always going to be something to do. There are still, feel free to read through this. There's pages, about seven of them, of people talking about little issues. There are a couple unusual and people talk about their use cases where apparently certain devices when they wanted to split the radios to do different things, some of those features are done. I usually don't split the radios to have different radios doing different things and it's only with certain models because some models like the base station XG have a couple extra radios. I believe there was a way to program each radio differently and some of those are grouped together now. I was a little fuzzy on that. I don't have, I looked around, none of our clients had one so I could try to reproduce the problem. We didn't have any model of exactly the one the person had but read through there and look to see if that may affect you and it's something that'll probably be addressing in another update. But overall, yes, it feels like it's timed update. Now one last thing about the updates and the way we process the way we do them is I do not have it turned on to auto. We do run our own controller. We do run this in our own virtualization stack. So I back up the virtual machine and I have the updates that I load manually. The reason I do that is I don't want surprises that, well, such as the ones that came from if you were to auto update. Some people have auto update turned on. So we went head on with some of their systems because they go, oh yeah, we just had that turned on. Can you help us? Because then it was some of the grouping problems, of course, some people had no problems at all. If you don't have any of these edge cases, I've had a few people mention they went from the 6.020 or even the 5.x to the 6.0 and every subsequent one in between and they've had no problems at all. It's really only seems to be and this is reiterated to me by Riley Chase from Hostify as well, that if you have the edge case problems and you have certain scenarios, yes, there may be some problems, there may be some issues, but hey, read through the documentation, make sure you understand what those problems are and then look for the workarounds from before you deploy. I'll leave links to this so you can do your own reading and happy updating. Thanks. And thank you for making it to the end of the video. If you liked 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'd like YouTube to notify you when new videos come out. 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