Building a Unifi Wireless Controller with a Raspberry Pi 3

June 4, 2016 Aaron DumbrowLeave a comment

Previously I talked about my Unifi wireless configuration. A critical part of ubiquity’s wireless is the controller. In a traditional home wireless configuration, the router, wireless access point, controller, and often a small switch are all built into the same device. This makes the system simpler, but far less powerful and flexible.

As I was exploring my options, I originally put the controller software on my mac mini we use as a media server. This caused some issues with port mapping since it uses port 8080 and 8443. One of my other media management products used port 8080 so I started looking for another solution. I tried following the documentation, which entailed building MongoDB, a painstaking process on an arm processor, so I opted to install the Debian package from the Ubiquity website. Pretty simple, but here are my lessons learned, and some quick shortcuts to get it done. As a side note, this seems to work on a Raspberry pi B+, but the performance is pretty spotty. The Raspberry pi 3 B+ is much more suited to the task.

The first step is to install the latest version of raspian. I opted for the “lite” version since I have no need for the desktop interface. Once you boot up and go through the basic setup, including the wifi configuration, you will need to grab the latest package from the the Ubiquity site, https://www.ubnt.com/download/unifi/. Make sure you grab the debian package as noted here.

Installing the package is pretty straight forward. SSH into the Raspberry PI and run the following after you download the software.

sudo dpkg -i unifi_sysvinit_all.deb

This should return several errors. To fix this, run the following commands.

sudo apt-get install -f

sudo dpkg -i unifi_sysvinit_all.deb

The second run of dpkg may or may not be necessary, but I like to be thorough.

Once that is done, simply open a browser on your computer and go to http://<raspberry pi ip>:8080. It will walk you through a pretty simple setup, and voila, you are done.

I did look at the cloud key, but for the extra cost, the reviews didn’t seem positive. At the cost of the Raspberry PI it is a simple and cost effective controller with minimal setup/maintenance.

Who moved my VMware C# Client?

May 18, 2016 Aaron DumbrowOperations Management, vExpert, Virtualizaiton, vmware, Web ClientLeave a comment

Years ago I was handed a rack of HP servers, a small EMC storage array, and a few CDs with something called ESX 2 on them. I was told I could use this software to put several virtual servers on the handful of physical servers I had available to me. There was a limited web client, available, most of my time was spent on the command line over SSH. The documentation was limited, I spent most of my time writing procedures for the company I was at, quickly earning my self a promotion, and a new role as a storage engineer.

Today VMware is announcing that the next release of the vSphere product line will deprecate the C# client in favor of the web client. As I have gone through this process, both as a vExpert and a VMware employee, there have been many questions. During our pre-announcement call with the product team at VMware, there were a number of concerns voiced about what will work on day 1 and what this does to the customers who have come to rely on performance. Rather than focus on the actual changes, most of which are still to be determined, it seemed more helpful to talk about the future of managing systems, and the future of operations.

When I started working on server administration, the number of systems one admin might manage was pretty low, maybe less than a dozen. With the advent of virtualization and cloud native applications, devops and no-ops, administrators are managing farms of servers, most of them virtual. We often hear about pets vs. cattle, the concept that most of our servers are moving from being pets, something we care for as a part of our family, to cattle, something we use to make money, if one of our cattle have a problem, we don’t spend too much time on it, we have many others, we can just make more.

Whether it is a VMware product, Openstack, or another management tool, abstracting deployment and management of systems is becoming more mainstream, and more cost effective. In this model, a management client is far less important than APIs and the full stack management they can enable. For the few use cases where the client is needed, the web client will continue to improve, but the true value is these improvements will drive new APIs and new tools developed for managing systems. While change is never easy, a longer term view both where we came from, and where we are going with the interfaces reminds us this is a necessary change, and less impactful than it may seem at first glance.

Automating my home: Sprinkler Automation

May 11, 2016 Aaron DumbrowLeave a comment

When I first heard about sprinkler automation, I couldn’t conceive of a reason to invest more into a system that was pretty much hands off. Our house has 5 zones mostly covering the backyard, and as pretty simple. What finally sold me on the idea was my wife asking me to go into the garage to hit the rain delay when I was getting dressed for work one morning. I started thinking about how silly it was that I had to go to all that effort just to shut down the sprinkler system for a day due to weather. The final straw though was when I tried to change the programming. I had thought my old home thermostat was painful to program, this made me want to give up on watering all together.

Doing a little research, I found out that our local water district will pay a substantial rebate for automated sprinkler systems. I dug into why this was, and what the potential savings might be. I found some systems with external sensors in ground to monitor the ground saturation, but the reviews on those were a bit troubling. Many reviews stated they required constant recalibration, and it seemed the technology might be a little immature at this point. For the most part, the mid range systems I was looking at all used local public weather station data to determine if they needed to run. The interfaces were designed for smartphone users, very user friendly, and designed for family use.

Based on rebates, and ease of use, I took the plunge with the Rachio 2. Setup was pretty simple, wiring it up was the toughest, just because I had a hard time getting the wires to seat. Not any fault of the product, but my hands are too big to handle the low voltage wiring. Joining the wireless was great, although I did typo my wifi password a couple times, but again, my own fault. The configuration of zones was flawless, it walked me through the process, testing each zone, and then labeling it with a friendly name. I was even able to take pictures of each zone and load them in.

As a bonus I was able to share the system with my wife. Rather than logging in with a single account, I can give her access, and if I ever have a landscaper to keep up my yard, I can give them limited access to adjust as needed. A small thing but pretty amazing they went to that level of detail. Another nice touch is, it notifies me when it is watering, and it lets me know when it makes adjustments due to changing weather conditions.

All in all, I couldn’t be happier, and I would recommend if your water district offers a rebate, it is a no brainer. Little improvements and quality of life gadgets like the Rachio 2 help manage our house, even when we aren’t there, and keep me from going out to the garage when I am half asleep to find the rain delay button.

Automating my home Wireless Revisited Part 1: Design

April 18, 2016 Aaron Dumbrowhome automation, ubiquity, unifi, wifi, wirelessLeave a comment

Since moving into our new home, I have been on a quest for new gadgets, and new ideas that would help make our home more manageable, and more enjoyable. Most of this has centered around controlling as much as possible remotely, generally from my iPhone. In earlier posts I wrote about various home wireless routers I had tried, and about my journey to settling on the Ubiquity wireless technology. Since I have been having many conversations recently about my configuration and the growth of my home network I thought it would be helpful to walk through my current configuration and explain some of the choices.

Router

Moving away from the all in one wireless router became imperative when I wanted to begin separating some of my traffic on my home network. It started with a a guest network on my Apple Airport Express devices, but as devices began to multiply in my house, I wanted more control over traffic and more functionality to block users access by time and various other criteria. This required a fully functional firewall with more advanced router functionality.

After significant research, the Ubiquiti EdgeRouter X met all my requirements at a very reasonable price. The biggest benefit here was having a full firewall, actual VLAN support, and the ability to create the DHCP scopes needed to support my new design. For the price, I determined if this didn’t work out it would be a fun lab experiment. After some review I decided against the Ubiquity Unifi Security Appliance, due to the lack of advanced functionality, the integration with the Unifi controller was tempting but not enough.

Switch

Initially when I was planning for a wired design, the physical switch was a pretty critical component. I was looking at several 24 port switches, more advanced functionality, and assuming that all VLANs would terminate at that central switch, with small 5 or 8 port access layers witches where needed for aggregating cabling as needed. As the wireless design unfolded, the switch became less relevant, and only required for the few devices without wireless, most of which sit next to the router.

After careful consideration and design review, the TP-LINK Easy Smart Switch 8 port TP-LINK Easy Smart Switch 8 port was again the best choice for what I was designing. I gave some consideration to the Ubiquity Unifi 24 port managed switch, but the additional functionality was not compelling enough for he significant price increase, especially since I only needed a few ports.

Controller

When I initially installed the software controller, I tried to use a first generation Raspberry pi B+. The process was cumbersome, and required me to build from source. In the end, it proved to be far too slow for my likings, and seemed a bit unstable.

To get things up and running, I installed the Unifi management software on my Mac Mini media server. This worked pretty well, but I prefer to isolate things as much as possible, and it required me to change the port on one of my media management apps.

As an experiment, I wanted to test out the new Raspberry Pi 3 as a controller, realizing that might make this something I could package for people who wanted better wireless. As it turned out, this model supported the native debian linux package for the controller, and is now my permanent controller.

Wireless Access Point

I have owned dozens of wireless routers. Unfortunately, I could never find a single solution that covered my whole house. When we moved into the new house, I decided I needed a system that would give me full coverage everywhere, even if it required multiple access points. After significant research, I finally settled on Ubiquity Unifi UAP-AC-PRO. I had to put watchers out on several sites, and finally was able to get ahold of one. I assumed I would need 2-3 to cover us, but the one has served incredibly well. The POE was also a huge benefit, I was able to simply do a quick cat6 run through my attic and drop it in the upstairs hall. It actually looks like a smoke detector if you don’t know what you are looking for, so it blends right in.

This post is just designed to give you the architecture, and some of the decision points. Soon I will go over some of the more interesting configurations in detail and explain why I made some design choices. The takeaway here is that for under $300 I ended up with enterprise wireless at my home. I have put all my streaming media on wifi with no issues, the only things plugged in are controllers and other devices without wifi. I am very happy with the system, and plan to do a similar configuration for friends and family who want a better wifi experience without the insane costs of Cisco Meraki or similar.

Enterprise Home Wireless and Home Automation

April 2, 2016 Aaron Dumbrowhome automation, wifi, wirelessLeave a comment

Solid Home wireless networks have become expected. We don’t think about them, we don’t want to invest much in them, but we want them to always work. For something so critical, it is logical for many users to implement a more Enterprise wireless system at home to support home automation and the myriad of new technologies that demand more and better wireless performance.

Why is home wireless so important?

My first home wireless access point was a Linksys running 802.11b, much slower than what we run today with significantly less range. I had one laptop which connected to it, which was great for our small apartment. We now live in a much larger house and use smart televisions and devices for streaming Netflix, Sling tv, and Plex to provide our entertainment. There are 2-3 devices between phones, tablets, and laptops, per person, not including our home media server, wireless thermostat, wireless cameras, and others. There are over 30 devices running off our home network at any given time, often with multiple HD video streams running simultaneously.

While we may be the extreme, it is also indicative of the direction that many home users are going. Recently a friend of my wife asked my sons and I to help setup her new smart tv. When I arrived, she had two wireless routers, one from Comcast, and a Linksys router, and too my surprise, both were broadcasting different SSID’s. I worked on the routers for a while, but eventually gave up and just left everything as it was because I wasn’t sure what the implications of changing it would be.

What should you look for in home wireless?

With many internet providers integrating wireless in their routers, often the installer from the provider will setup the basic wireless service. This is great for getting the user going, but this introduces some significant issues. First the wireless routers are often used equipment, whatever the technician happens to have in their van. For many of these providers they also use these wireless routers to provide a public hotspot for their other customers. This is done using a separate network, but is still a potential security risk. Finally the features on these routers are fairly limited. Updating the firmware often requires the providers tech support, not my idea of a good time.

For all home wireless users, purchasing a wireless router is at least a very good idea. Types of routers depend widely on the size of the home, and the types of devices used. At a minimum, at this point, 802.11ac routers should be selected with features like a guest network being a standard feature. Most modern wireless routers come with several gigabit ports on the back as well which is nice for devices which may not have a wireless connection. Finally range is critical to look at. With the rise of “Mesh” routers, basically the concept that you can drop in several routers throughout the house and they connect to each other wirelessly to extend the wireless network, it is important to remember that this is going to significantly slow the performance of your wireless network.

How do you set it up?

From a performance perspective it is important to consider how fast your home internet connection is, and what you are using the home network for. Having fast wireless is critical for me, due to the number of devices connecting out to the internet, but also because we stream movies and tv shows we own from a central media server, or the internet. A majority of the content is internal to the home network so we have an incredibly robust wireless system. I also have chosen to purchase my cable modem to ensure that we have a good quality connection outside. We have a fairly advanced network with different wireless for the children, a separate guest network, and even a separate network for devices such as cameras and the thermostat. This ensures that if there is a problem with a device I have less control over, I can isolate the problem.

Unless you are someone who fully understands how to configure some of the more advanced settings, it is often wise to find someone to help. While it is tempting to go it alone, this is a risky proposition when you consider how much of our life is online. Offering a friend working in IT, or your local IT guy some cash, or other bribes is always a good way to get some help, or looking at services offered by Geek Squad at Best Buy or other similar companies is often wise. It is always good to remember you get what you pay for, and you wouldn’t do surgery on yourself. It is also wise to seek advice from these type of people on what to purchase. While $200 or more for a wireless access router may seem like a lot, it is important to remember that wireless internet is an essential part of our daily lives.

As more devices connect to our networks, and we continue to expect more from these systems, better devices, with more complex configurations are required to keep up. While most people can read the instructions and get the basic out of the box configuration to work, a more advanced and full feature set is likely available. Getting assistance, and learning about how wireless can help simplify your life and provide more opportunities for home automation can be a critical for the home user just as much as the business user.

Mentoring makes the leader

March 22, 2016 Aaron DumbrowLeave a comment

Jim Rohn once said, “You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.” To grow as a leader, find someone who knows what you want to learn, and to teach it to others. We all have so much we can learn, but we often need someone to mentor us, and to mentor someone else. Having these types of relationships will help us to raise that average of the five people we are surrounded with.

Find a mentor

Management consultant Peter Drucker told us, “My greatest strength as a consultant is to be ignorant and ask a few questions.” Finding a mentor is not some big formal process, it is as simple as identifying what you want to learn. Most people want to help others, they don’t know how to get started. Having a mentor is as simple as asking someone to coffee, or asking someone if you can ask them a few questions, and then keeping it going. The real challenge is keeping the relationship valuable for both sides. Bring something that the mentor is interested in, find a value, a way to connect.

When I am at an event, I often ask speakers for their reading list. I always try to read as many of the books as I can, and be prepared in case I meet them again. I look to keep the conversation going by suggesting a similar book or a new perspective. Sometimes I just bring them perspective from a new industry, or a different area. Looking for a broader perspective, looking for mentors outside my career field helps me to grow beyond my comfort zone.

Be a Mentor

There is an old saying, the best way to learn something is to teach it. We all have experiences that we can share with others, and there is always someone who can benefit from our experiences. Being available to mentor others, always listening, always being a sounding board makes others begin to see you as a mentor. As you begin to develop these relationships, teaching and growing others, you find that you force yourself to get better, to keep on top of things, to push yourself harder.

I belong to a LinkedIn group for mentoring Veterans, and I am working with my employer to help start a diversity program focused on mentoring veterans. I don’t focus on the big things, how to be a huge success, I just give simple advice, and mostly just encourage people. You would be surprised how far a positive word, an encouraging statement can go for someone who is junior in their field. Even when I can’t address their specific issue, often they just need someone to encourage them.

Peer Mentoring

The world is big, and I am so full of questions. Oftentimes what we really need is someone to walk next to us, someone who shares our struggles, someone who has the same struggles, and who can understand where we are today. Asking for help is a difficult thing, especially when we are new to an industry, or when we don’t want others to know how much we are struggling. Managers are not always the best place to get help, sometimes we need someone close by.

A friend and I in my current position were challenged during our on-boarding training to peer mentor each other. It started out as a chance to make stupid jokes, and have a weekly phone call. It has turned into a program we still use to bring new team members in. There is still lots of joking, and far more personal stuff than work, but it has kept us focused and growing. As new people have come in they add new perspectives and enrich our group. We have grown so much that we now are splitting into multiple groups to keep the concept going. For something we had intended to be a short term peer support, we have been amazed to find the power of community, especially a peer community.

To grow as a leader, find someone who knows what you want to learn, and to teach it to others. “Stay hungry stay foolish”, Steve Jobs quoted this from the final issue of The Whole Earth Catalog in his 2005 commencement speech at Stanford University. Always look for opportunities to learn and grow, ask questions, find people who want to keep the conversation going, be that person for others, and help others at your level. No matter who you are you have much to learn and much to contribute, it is as simple as starting a conversation.

The changing landscape of high-tech startups, what it means for the future of technology.

March 17, 2016 Aaron Dumbrowhyperconverged, startups, storage startups, technology, vExpertLeave a comment

In his book Good to Great, Jim Collins points out, “When used right, technology becomes an accelerator of momentum, not a creator of it” Technology, he goes on to point out, is not the reason for the success of great companies, but rather a critical component of their strategy. Technology is a means to an end, but for those outside the tech world, it is simply one tool to be exploited.

There is no doubt that the landscape is changing for technology, especially technology startups. In 2015, and indeed for several years prior, we have seen insane valuations of companies that had yet to produce an actual product. To make matters worse, those that do produce a product, produce something which is very impressive, but mostly just a little better than the competition. Usually it is a new way of compressing data, a new de-duplication algorithm, or a way to do analytics on the data at rest. All very cool, and every one thinking they are going to be the next big thing. There is an old saying which goes something like build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door, or something like that. The problem is that everyone is building a slightly better mousetrap with slightly different features when what we need is just a basic mousetrap. This is true of storage, hyper-converged, and every other technology startup in the past few years.

Generally speaking we can say that history repeats itself, especially in the high tech world. I was preparing to leave the military during the dot com bubble, just as it burst, I made the last minute decision to stay in and give myself more time to prepare. While this may not exactly be a bubble, we are trending toward a massive consolidation of these high tech startups. The reason is simple, we are overcomplicating everything. Businesses, much like consumers, don’t want complicated flashy technology, they want technology to accelerate what they are doing, they want to augment and improve their lives with technology. In the Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time, Douglas Adams makes the point,”We are stuck with technology when what we really want is just stuff that works.” The future of technology is not one off complex cool solutions, it is abstraction, simplicity, and integration. If your product doesn’t simplify business or consumers lives, it is likely to be short lived.

Enterprise Architecture – When is good enough, good enough?

February 23, 2016 Aaron DumbrowCloud computing, software defined, technology, virtualizationLeave a comment

In a conversation with a large customer recently we were discussions their enterprise architecture. A new CIO had come in and wants to move them to a converged infrastructure. I digging into what their environment was going to look like as they migrated, and why they wanted to make that move. It came down to a good enough design versus maximizing hardware efficiency. Rather than trying to squeeze every bit of efficiency out of the systems, they were looking at how could they deploy a standard, and get a high degree of efficiency but the focus was more on time to market with new features.

My first foray into enterprise architecture was early in my career at a casino. I moved from a DBA role to a storage engineer position vacated by my new manager. I spend most of my time designing for performance to resolve poorly coded applications. As applications improved, I started to push application teams and vendors to fix the code on their side. As I started to work on the virtualization infrastructure design for this and other companies, I took pride in driving CPU and memory as hard as I could. Getting as close to maxing out the systems while providing enough overhead for failover. We kept putting more and more virtual systems into fewer and fewer servers. In hindsight we spent far more time designing, deploying, and managing our individual snowflake hosts and guests that what we were saving in capital costs. We were masters of “straining the gnat to swallow the camel”.

Good enterprise design should always take advantage of new technologies. Enterprise architects must be looking at roadmaps to prevent obsolescence. With the increased rate of change, just think about unikernel vs containers vs virtual machines, we are moving faster than our hardware refresh cycles on all of our infrastructure.

This doesn’t mean that converged or hyper-converged infrastructure is better or worse, it is an option, but one that is restrictive since the vendor must certify your chosen hypervisor, management software, automation software, etc. with each part of the system they put together. On the other hand, building your own requires you do that.
The best solution is going to come with compromises. We cannot continue to look at virtual machines or services per physical host. Time to market for new or updated features are the new infrastructure metric. The application teams ability to deploy packaged or developed software is what matters. For those of us who grew up as infrastructure engineers and architects, we need to change our thinking, change our focus, and continue to add value by being partners to our development and application admin brethren. That is how we truly add business value.

AUTOMATING MY HOME PART 6: Wireless Security cameras revisited, wireless segmentation, and flood lights

February 7, 2016 Aaron DumbrowLeave a comment

Previously I talked about looking a the Lorex security camera system using wired Power over Ethernet, PoE. From a physical security perspective, and a not being restricted by the location of power outlets it made sense.

As usual though the “Wife Acceptance Factor” was the real test. I have learned she, as my primary user, gives me the best feedback on what is a good idea. I started asking her what she wanted out of a camera system. It turn out, it is less about security, and more about her checking in on the kids when they got home from school, and looking in on the dog, and making sure the front door was closed. This lead us to look at wireless cameras, due to the challenges of running wires between floors of the house.

We settled on the Samsung Smartcam HD for the simple reason it supports local recording to an SD card. While this was not critical, it was helpful for some short term replays to keep an eye on the house, but more importantly to capture hilarious incidents like nerf gun wars with the kids, or she and I trying to get our Christmas tree out of the house. The quality is very solid, and we have had no major complaints after 6 weeks now.

With the cameras and the ecobee3 thermostat, we started to see a number of devices that simply need internet access, but do not need to access the local lan. When I put in the Ubiquity WAP I initially gave us 3 SSID’s all on separate VLAN’s, the main wireless for media and work, the kids, and the guest network. This weekend I added the fourth for our home automation devices. While this is not strictly necessary, it is nice to keep them separated from the rest of our devices, and limits our exposure if there is a problem.

Recently we had some weird sounds in our backyard well after dark. It sounded like a bobcat or a coyote had gotten ahold of a house cat or small dog. We checked in the morning and didn’t see signs of anything, but to be honest it was a bit disconcerting. My newest project is to put up floodlights in the back yard, enough to scare off anything that comes in to visit. The main challenge has been how to make it look professional, and how to involve some type of automation. I looked at pure motion sensors, but that didn’t seem to be what we wanted. I am considering some type of smart lighting system, but ultimately it may come down to a simple remote switch connected to the light.

The backyard lighting gets more important as we move into spring and summer where we will get more time outdoors. We are also building a fire pit soon, not automation related, but I am working on how to include something electronic, probably a bluetooth speaker or something similar. Always fun, and always one more project.

Ravello Systems: a very good replacement for home labs, almost.

February 4, 2016 Aaron DumbrowLeave a comment

As a vExpert I have been privileged to have the use of Ravello Systems, https://www.ravellosystems.com/. For those not familiar with it, basically they front end AWS and Google Cloud Platform enabling you to run most modern operating systems with a simple interface, including VMware vSphere.

As a technologist, I always have a number of projects going. I am a hands on type of person, and I like to understand how things work by building and breaking them. This normally happens on various lab equipment I purchase, or inherit, which works for the most part, although it is an expensive hobby.

Ravello Systems was intriguing beyond AWS or Google Cloud mainly because of their simple interface, blueprint based approach, and the ease of spinning up a quick vSphere lab, or even some random things that I needed to test such as a Vyatta based firewall, don’t ask. The most time consuming part of creating a system was simply the time it took to upload ISO’s if I needed something custom. The price for what I do is pretty reasonable, when you consider the cost of the infrastructure, and the time I am actually running things in the lab.

Of course no system is perfect. My biggest issue was the inability to run a VMware vCenter 6 Appliance in their cloud. I tried a number of hacks, but the only thing that worked was running it nested, which was just too slow for what I needed. I also struggled with some security concerns, not their issue, my own concerns when I debated testing my Unifi controller for my home wifi as a cloud service.

One of my favorite uses was digging deeper into docker. While I can deploy containers as VM’s in Fusion on my laptop, it seemed more logical to run some tests that were actually in the cloud. Impressively simple again, and reasonable responsive since they were running as nested systems.

Going forward, the future of not just labs, but many production applications is likely spread across multiple cloud service providers and probably some internal systems. For my purposes this model works quite well. I appreciate this service from Ravello Systems, and I would suggest that this could make a good home lab replacement if we can just stop hugging our home lab systems.

Aaron Dumbrow Random Thoughts

Making your home smarter