Adding Ubiquiti’s UniFi AP AC Pro to the Home Lab

A while back, I purchased a Meraki MX60w security appliance to act as a gateway between the house, home lab, and WAN segments. It’s a rock solid choice that continues to run in production. However, the wireless feature was fairly lackluster. I’m certainly not a wireless professional, but I would expect the signal to propagate nicely into a small apartment. Instead, I had signal issues just going from one room to the next. Fiddling around with the settings did not bear fruit, either.

I decided to keep the security appliance, remove the wireless feature (unscrew the antennas and disable the SSID), and purchase a very popular wireless product from Ubiquiti: the UniFi AP AC Pro.

unifi-box

Out of the box, it looks like a white flying saucer with a blue ring around it and is designed to be incredibly simple and robust. These are two important features for anything that goes into my house.

unifi-inside-box

Power is provided by either the included power injector or a PoE switch. Because I have only one AP, and already have a fairly nice Cisco SG300-52 switch (write-up here), I opted to go with the power injector.

unifi-injector

The thing is essentially stateless. Management and configuration is provided by a controller application that runs on my workstation. It immediately found the AP and allowed me to push a configuration.

unif-controller

There really isn’t much to it. I didn’t fiddle with any of the advanced settings because the AP worked out of the box and I don’t want to turn nerd knobs for zero reason. I supplied a name for the AP and some details on the wireless network. The AP rebooted itself, came online, and started serving requests.

unifi-wireless-settings

Because I used the same SSID and password as the previous wireless network, all of my devices just hopped back on. Now, however, they had full signal. I can see this on a per-client basis in the UniFi Controller. As an example, here’s my phone from several rooms away where the Meraki would lose signal entirely. 🙂

unifi-phone-strength

There are a ton of other whiz-bang features, but all I was really looking for was an AP that works everywhere and doesn’t require me to do anything special. With the UniFi AP AC Pro, I found that. I have it plugged directly into the Meraki as the upstream gateway on its own LAN segment, along with a guest SSID for those that I don’t want on my home lab networks. It’s been about a month and I’m really pleased with this AP, especially if I want to grow into more APs because the configuration is pushed to any other devices that I connect into the fabric.

This AP has made working on the home lab via my various wireless devices much less painful, and I can now sit out on the lawn and do some PowerShell coding if desired. 🙂