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Road to Advanced Networking: Part 3 - WiFi upgrading

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What to replace

I have an UniFi AP AC LR loaded with Openwrt. Why Openwrt? Because I'm not paying for planned obsolescence, crippleware, or worst of all cloud connected infrastructure. Also at the time, I didn't know too much about Ubiquiti. Overall however, it has been great. I got 50% more coverage over the ISP router and more control. I had some backyard coverage, was fine in the garage, and fine for most of the bedrooms.

Fast-forward 5? years and there is just too much noise. Everything in the world runs on 2.4ghz. It's passable in the high traffic areas and borderline useless in the bedrooms. The Steam Deck is really unhappy with it. Seems like the wifi on the Deck is actually on the weaker side. It's unstable in bedroom, around 1mb/s peak? averaging 500-2kb/s. In my computer room, the 2.4ghz is faster than the 5ghz because of the signal strength.

I took a quick look at Zyxel but it just wasn't ready for Openwrt at the time of purchase. Instead, I got a UniFi 6 LR since it did 4x4 wifi 6/ax and fully supported in Openwrt.

New AP

Alllrighhtttt! Shiny box, Cool self explanatory mount INSERT PICTURE HERE, aaaand oh. It requires POE+ NOOOOOooo

The AP-AC-LR was just POE and was fine but the only open injector I have is 15 watts. This thing wants at least 24 watts.

There is so much happening and im low in energy to have full narrative, doing a outline for now (maybe forever for how long this is)

  • receive injector
  • awesome mount with all the mounting points and labeled.
  • turn on, but can't ssh because i don't know the address! got it all setup as AP, didn't need cloud. was able to setup via phone and do its job
  • openwrt says to use arp to find address but that didn't work, next time just use nmap -sn 192.168.1.0/24
  • used router to find what ip it was, connected via ssh, flashed open wrt OMFG WRONG IMAGE!!! i did sysupgrade image, not the first time install image!
  • tried recovery mode, instructions are WRONG! and inconsistent,
  • instructions say to plug in data while holding reset but also talks about multiple ports. kidna suggests its already on?
  • anyways, hold reset, power on, special pattern
  • guide says 192.168.1.20
  • NOPE no one there, online forums and nmap says 192.168.1.32
  • frustrating!! my pc on windows found it via nmap but does not TFTP !?!?
  • was ready to call it bricked and go for serial recovery. heatgun and effort did not budge it at all
  • cant use acetone on the adhesive because the plastic seems to be ABS or similar
  • realized i didn't try manjaro via the newly discovered ip
  • pc on manjaro does not properly recognize the usb ethernet adapter
  • laptop on manjaro does not nmap or properly set ip address after the first time i used it
  • laptop able to send over TFTP no problem! -_- OK
  • flash, doesn't properly work?? app doesn't find
  • AP is in "waiting for adoption"
  • nmap on pc/windows says it is on 192.168.1.20... HUH WTF
  • ubiquiti needs to put in their documentation, if < x version, 192.168.1.32. greater = 192.168.1.20.... IDIOTS!
  • still can't adopt but now i can ssh with ubnt:ubnt
  • .... now gonna load openwrt with the correct image this time (:
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