Re: [PLUG] Freemesh networking

[Rich Freeman via plug <plug@lists.phillylinux.org>]

On Thu, Mar 26, 2020 at 7:29 PM Eric Lucas via plug
<plug@lists.phillylinux.org> wrote:
> I'm surviving on my Verizon FiOSrouter for now but a mesh network would be very nice.

Mesh can be pretty neat.

The other week while attaching a Pi to a switch I accidentally
disconnected its LAN connection back to the main switch in the house,
thus cutting off its link to the internet/etc.  I didn't even notice
until the next day when I happened to notice the UniFi controller
giving one of the access points a low WiFi experience score and
noticing that all my WiFi devices were connecting to my outdoor AP.

That switch had my main indoor AP attached to it, and when the AP
detected that it had lost its uplink back to the gateway/DHCP/etc it
established a mesh connection to my outdoor AP, and thus all the
devices that were wired on that switch still had an uplink.  I had
been watching TV and playing with my RetroPie on that switch and never
realized it had lost its LAN connection.  I reconnected the LAN
connection and then after an alert about spanning tree issues from the
controller the APs figured out they both had wired uplinks and began
operating normally again and dropped their mesh link.

Obviously WiFi performance is going to suffer with mesh, though the
more modern APs with MIMO/etc have quite a bit more capacity.  I'm not
even using all of it for my one AP as it would require two gigabit
wired uplinks to actually carry all the data.

I do have to say that UniFi is fairly plug-and-play in general though.
The only device that needed any real tweaking was the USG because it
defaults to serving DHCP and I wanted it to request DHCP, which
required the usual business of plugging a laptop into it and getting
it configured a bit before adopting it.

-- 
Rich
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