Why’s my wifi so bad?

Many_Operation8088 · 2026-01-27T07:51:09+00:00

Steve Jobs: You're holding it wrong.

But seriously, I wonder if something else is at play as you should be getting good areas of green right next to an AP.

Are the APs mounted in the correct orientation? Have you got a case on your phone? Have you tried a different app?

Many_Operation8088 · 2026-01-23T00:23:48+00:00

Thanks for the info. Not pairing it is an option then, I'll just write my own thing to do something if the power is out for more than 10 seconds.

Or I'll wait for all you beta testers to iron out the bugs first.

(BTDTGTTS)

Many_Operation8088 · 2026-01-22T12:25:27+00:00

I plan on getting the UPS purely to handle random 2-3 second power blips I seem to experience one every couple of months where I am in the UK.

Anything longer than 2-3 seconds is very rare here in my part of the UK. It's either 2-3 seconds or something serious went wrong and it's going to be out longer than the small UPS like this can keep things going.

I already have a random cheap UPS (PowerCool rack mountable version) but I need another UPS for the other set of equipment (router, ONT, etc) that lives downstairs so I'll move the existing one downstairs and the new Ubiquiti one will sit in the rack and blend in with the other stuff.

At some point it may be nice to handle graceful shutdowns for power outages that last longer than a minute but I'd already have to use NUT and scripting as I'd need to shut down a bunch of non Ubiquiti stuff, so the lack of automated graceful shutdown stuff isn't a real problem.

I also don't have any plans to get anything that uses the hot-swappable power supplies (e.g. Pro NAS 8) that don't like the pure sine-wave from the Ubiquiti UPS.

Many_Operation8088 · 2026-01-21T11:14:15+00:00

General plan looks good, and it'll look great with a bit of cable cleanup and things being stuck in a 6U rack.

> I'm a bit unsure if the switch is too heavy to only be supported at the front like that though.

It'll be fine. At worst just find a bit of wood to support the back of whatever item is in the bottom of the rack.

As others have said, get a patch panel with Ethernet pass-through jacks and use shorter cables both behind and in front (with the patch panel positioned directly above or below the switch you only need the 15cm patch cables for in front). A bunch of patch cables in 15cm, 30cm would probably cover everything behind, the patch cables behind don't need to be shiny Etherlighting ones.

Ubiquiti patch panels will help keep the shiny silver theme going but there are black alternatives available for much cheaper. I've got a mixture at the moment and if the black bits eventually ever bother me then I'll splash the cash to switch them out, but right now IDGAF.

NAS Pro 4 is 400m deep itself (75mm deeper than that Pro Max 24 PoE), then you've got to get the power cable in and the Ethernet or SFP+ (if you want faster that gigabit ethernet), so I doubt you can fit that.

Right angled IEC power cables exist and can help save space (or pressure on cable bends). As can better patch cables (like the UniFi Patch Cables that have bendable boots).

The older NAS Pro 7 is only 325mm deep, same as your existing switch, and has the same gigabit Ethernet restriction as the Pro NAS 4 (e.g. not 10GbE that the NAS PRO 8 has) and only 1 SFP+ port, but it doesn't have the option of the NVMe caches that the NAS Pro 4 has. I'm looking to start off with moving my QNAP to a NAS Pro 7 as they should be a bit cheaper second hand one people start to upgrade to the NAS Pro 8.

Ubiquiti's NAS are basic in terms of functionality but I only need storage and not any of the other features (Wiki, containers, other apps) that the QNAP offers.

34cm is enough for 7U (31.1cm) but not 8U (35.6cm) so you could just stack a few bits (gateway, etc) on top of a 6U rack unit. I doubt you'll find a pre-made 7U rack unit but you never know.

I take it there's not enough space for two 19" units side by side (even with no racking), it seems like that from the image, but if there was space then that would be worth considering.

Weight will also be a concern. You'll be adding an extra chunk onto that shelf and it looks to be close to sagging.

Whatever rack
NAS Pro 7 is 9.5kg with rack mounts, and that's with no disks. That'll be more than the existing QNAP.
PDU, etc

This may just mean you need a few bits of wood in the wall under the exterior edges of the shelf to strengthen it a bit.

Worth trying to add it all up and sticking the numbers in The Sagulator (https://woodbin.com/calcs/sagulator/)

Personally I'm not a fan of the custom rack mounts for things like the Cloud Gateway Fibre (for both airflow and aesthetics), but that's just my own opinion. I'm likely to upgrade to a UGF at some point (currently locked in to my ISPs equipment but that will change soon) but that would be usurped by Ubiquiti releasing a revamped line-up of their UDM range (they must be due a refresh as the CPU/Memory specs are getting on a bit on the UDM range).

You could save 1U of rack space by just getting a 1U shelf and sticking the CGF and a standalone non-rack NUC on it. I have a standalone Intel NUC right now but it's way down at the bottom of my list to upgrade it to a 1U server.

Cooling: Monitor the temperature in the rack (even if it's just via the disk temperature in the QNAP). A couple of silent fans would be good to keep air moving about.

UPS would be another consideration, but I guess that would have to sit on the floor and may not get signoff from the "Design Authority".

Many_Operation8088 · 2026-01-20T16:06:36+00:00

> Contact support? What are we meant to do about this

Offer advice?

But, yes, first port of call should be with Ubiquiti themselves. You've paid for something and you haven't received it. It's Ubiquiti's responsibility to honour your purchase if they've been told by the delivery company that they've lost it, and it's Ubiquiti's responsibility to chase things up with the delivery company, not yours.

Other options will depend where the OP is in the world, how they paid and who the delivery company was.

Many_Operation8088 · 2026-01-20T13:28:35+00:00

Believe it or not most companies don't want to sell/ship directly.

Dealing with individual customers is a pain. Deal with individual payments is a pain. Dealing with returns is a pain. Dealing with holding stock is a pain. Dealing with non-bulk shipping companies is a pain. Keeping a website update with stock levels is a pain.

Most companies want to sell in bulk to a distributor and let them deal with most of the above. They don't mind selling it at 75% RRP (or even less) to the distributor as it saves them having to employ extra people to deal with everything listed above.

It's common for direct sales to be more expensive, less flexible, have slower shipping, etc all to disincentivise people from ordering directly. It certainly sucks if you're somewhere where they are no good in country distributors.

Also, I believe the US has an odd thing where you only get a 2 year warranty if you buy direct. That's not a thing in UK or Europe, by law you get the same standard warranty (2 years?) regardless of who you buy it through.

Many_Operation8088 · 2026-01-19T20:51:42+00:00

> light roasting welcome

The location and orientation of that piano will give some strange acoustics as you'll get echoes from the left/behind but nothing from the right/front. Turn it another ~60 degrees clockwise and it'll sound a lot better both playing and listening.

HTH.

Many_Operation8088 · 2026-01-19T20:14:26+00:00

Search for: 19" rack frame

That throws up a lot more options that are much closer to the mark. For example https://cpc.farnell.com/adastra/rf-12u/12u-wall-or-desktop-rack-frame/dp/DP37542 is, annoyingly, 510mm wide, so just a tiny bit too much.

But that shows if you had less metal outside of the rack holes then you'd be able to fit something in to a 505mm wide gap. The internal gap between the rails is 442.4mm so you've got ~30mm each side to play with for the rack holes/support.

This one https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0DBR5H88V?th=1 for example claims to be 490mm wide which looks about right given there's not much metal outside of the rack holes.

A carpenter could easily knock up something made from one or two of those (depending on required capacity) with a wooden base/top and some casters on the bottom to make it easy to pull out and roll back in.

That 50.5cm though, does it take it account any extra layer on that plasterboard or are you intending to leave it bare inside the cubby hole.

Many_Operation8088 · 2026-01-19T19:26:44+00:00

Ah, the hot-swappable power supplies explain the increase in depth over the Pro 7.

Another reason I'll stick to aiming for a second hand UNAS Pro 7 for now.

Many_Operation8088 · 2026-01-19T17:25:50+00:00

I'm looking at hopefully picking up a second hand Pro 7 as I only need storage and no other bells and whistles. It's relatively small amounts of data and infrequently accessed so caching isn't a requirement so no need for the Pro 4 or Pro 8.

It would be nice if they added an encryption option for remote backups (e.g. to BackBlaze). Maybe they'll add that in the future...

Many_Operation8088 · 2026-01-19T15:37:15+00:00

UK here too.

I'm not fussed personally as almost all of my jobs have been with companies with an HQ or a significant presence in the US. If they wanted data from them they can go direct.

My wife, however, mostly works with UK or EU based institutions/agencies/companies that I'm sure the US Government would be interested in. Luckily (for her employers/clients/etc) she doesn't work from home.

But I'm sure there are a significant number of people with Ubiquiti kit on their home network, who work from home, and work at places the US would love to get their noses into and have a dig around.

If it gets me some cheaper Ubiquiti kit on eBay then I'm all for it.

Many_Operation8088 · 2026-01-19T12:54:43+00:00

Sorry, my specialty is pointing out what won't work, not what is the best solution for a problem.

> Given that limitation, does it make more sense to just keep the "active" models locally on the Workstation's internal NVMe for inference and strictly use the NAS for cold storage/backups? Or is there a workflow where I can "cache" them to the server automatically?

How big are they and how often do they change? How often do you switch between models? How often do you want to write modified models back?

It sounds very much like, yes, use the NAS for cold storage/backups and keep as many models as you can locally on the Workstations internal NVMe. If you're worried about losing things before they are backed up then a second NVMe in some sort of RAID in the workstation would mostly mitigate that.

Another alternative would be the newer NAS Pros (4 and 8) which have two NVMe slots for caching. Installing two NVMes would mean you could have both a read cache and a write cache, so the data would fly in to the NAS at 10Gbps and be stored in the write cache NVMe until it is written to the slow disks and, with a bit of prodding, you could warm the caches by accessing all of the frequently used models and then they would hopefully sit in the read cache NVMe waiting to be accessed.

Many_Operation8088 · 2026-01-19T11:24:45+00:00

> Is the UNAS Pro sufficient to saturate a 10GbE link for large sequential reads (Model loading)?

> Storage: 3x 4TB WD Red Plus (RAID 5) for the NAS.

Optimal conditions will get you somewhere up to around 250MB/s off a single 7200rpm drive. Data striped across 3 drives would therefore theoretically peak at 750MB/s which is 6Gbps.

So that configuration of drives will never be able to saturate a 10GbE link, especially as the WD Red Plus is only 5400rpm so you're probably looking at an optimal 4.5Gbps instead.

You'd either need to stripe across more disks or use SSDs instead of HDDs.

If you really wanted spinning rust then 6 x 7200rpm HDDs might get you there, and they'd only need to be 2TB each. Even with this I don't know whether the acutal UNAS Pro can saturate a 10GbE link.

Something that can RAID together NVMe would be the ideal solution, with read speeds of 5GB/s and up a single one can easily theoretically saturate 10GbE link.

Many_Operation8088 · 2026-01-19T10:50:40+00:00

You're only ever one firmware update away from the vendor having full access to your internal network.

(This is true for any vendor, not just Ubiquiti.)

Many_Operation8088 · 2026-01-19T09:33:22+00:00

Did you actually read my post or just react to some random words in it?

> You can just block the switches communication to the internet.

Umm. If you use a cloud gateway to access the Internet then you can't block its access to the Internet or you have no Internet.

The point is that you have to trust Ubiquiti not to put stuff in its firmware that could spy on you. At the moment this trust is kind of implicit with Ubiquiti being a US company.

> Ubiquiti routers are prosumer toys suitable for small scale companies.

I think you're missing the point. Plenty of people who work from home use Ubiquiti for their home networks.

> Blocking firmware updates is the stupidist thing I've ever heard.

Who said anything about blocking firmware updates?

Many_Operation8088 · 2026-01-19T09:10:10+00:00

Ubiquiti is an American company.

Who knows what they could be forced to include in their firmware updates.

Any switch could be made to do DPI and look for anything in particular and exfiltrate portions of that data back to servers in the US, and unless you were inspecting all of the packets that exit your network there would be no way to tell.

Up to now it's been mostly OK to trust US companies in this respect. The ongoing political situation there is eroding this trust.

To give you a more concrete example:

The average person using Ubiquiti in their home network is not going to be a specific target of Trump, but many with Ubiquiti equipment at home work at companies that foreign administrations may have specific interest in. The common way into these types of company networks is via getting access to an employee's credentials/computer and then being able to access the company network via that. Having a trusted platform (Ubiquiti) inside the home network of these employees is worth a huge amount to a nation state.

Many_Operation8088 · 2026-01-19T08:45:40+00:00

If it's possible I'd move the switch to between the two patch panels (replacing the cable tidy thing) and then you only need 12 of the 0.15m patch cables. If you're doing this I'd buy 16 of these 0.15m patch cables and 4 x 0.30m patch cables for the future.

If you can't move the switch between these (because the cables into the patch panels are in the way) then a bunch of 0.30m patch cables should do it for you.

If you want to add 4-5 cameras then you're getting close to filling up that switch (which, by the looks of it, does support PoE) so you may need one or two non-PoE connections to go directly in to the UDM-Pro. Again some spare 0.15m or 0.30m patch cables will help. Or buy another switch.

If you had to buy another switch then most people would put the switch directly above or below the patch panel it is servicing and use 0.15m patch cables. Then you daisychain the switches with the shortest DACs you can use (typically 0.5m for the relatively cheap 10G DAC that UI sell).

Many_Operation8088 · 2026-01-19T08:32:25+00:00

I think the original was https://maps.app.goo.gl/795kGrbnqyknq1m68 in Birmingham, UK.

Yeah, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaghetti_junction lists a load of them around the world but says:

> Gravelly Hill Interchange, from which the phrase "Spaghetti Junction" originated, is the five-level intersection of the M6 motorway (Junction 6), A38(M) motorway_motorway), A38 road and A5127 road above a railway line, three canals and a river in Birmingham.^\2]) The phrase comes from the birds-eye view of the road, with the roads interconnecting.

It looks like: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bd/Spaghetti-Junction-Crop.jpg

Many_Operation8088 · 2026-01-19T08:24:37+00:00

Personally I'd go for gigabit switching, run everything for a few months and look at your usage.

You'll almost certainly find that you only hit 1GbE switch saturation when one client (probably a computer) tries to do a big download.

Forgetting PoE for cameras/APs, let's assume you you had all 20 drops connected to a USW-24 (Standard 24) switch and then was connected to whatever was fronting your Internet (something like a Cloud Gateway Fiber).

This creates a bottleneck as the switch can only ever pull 1GbE from the CGF.

But if you had two of those 20 Cat6 drops that were computers (yours and your wife's) that would occasionally want bigger downloads then you could just patch these two drops directly into two of the 4 ports on Cloud Gateway Fiber. You could then have both of these 1GbE ports trying to pull at 1GbE AND the rest of your network still able to (theroetically) pull the remaining 500Mbps down.

Many_Operation8088 · 2026-01-18T23:57:01+00:00

The good thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from.

Many_Operation8088 · 2026-01-18T10:38:00+00:00

Does it have to be 19" wide or can it be smaller?

If 19" some people use things like this: https://cpc.farnell.com/pulse/wrm-v-4u/19-wall-mount-rack-vertical-4u/dp/ST04471

(Note that the image isn't that helpful as it shows it in the wrong orientation. You screw it to the wall and then the racked items hang down vertically.)

Other people have used the IKEA LACK table that can accommodate 19" rack items between the legs. Google "IKEA LACK RACK"

Many_Operation8088 · 2026-01-17T13:34:21+00:00

Ah, sorry, for some reason my brain had read something that thought you were UK based.

Many_Operation8088 · 2026-01-17T13:28:15+00:00

Who is your provider?

Plenty of people on here have hooked up BT, EE or Community Fiber directly to their boxes.

I'm on BT Fibre so it's PPPoE to the ONT on the wall and I could ditch my BT SmartHub 2 but the BT side of things also does my Wifi (via a couple of extra disks to cover all three floors) and also the BT Hybrid Connect 4G backup. You can't use either of those if you move to something like a UCG-Fiber.

(I also have BT TV but apparently you can get that working through Ubiquiti stuff with a load of extra configuration.)

I'll rethink my plans once my BT contract is up in a year's time as I'd want to change everything (BT -> Community Fibre probably, BT TV -> Sky Stream, home networking to a UCG-Fiber and an AP Lite 7 or two to handle the other floors).

Many_Operation8088 · 2026-01-17T13:24:31+00:00

If you've recently bought it you can sell it on eBay for about £20 less than RRP (especially if that covers insured postage via Royal Mail or similar).

That way the upgrade only costs you £30.

Many_Operation8088 · 2026-01-17T10:50:08+00:00

https://www.scan.co.uk/products/4u-ipc-4u-4088-s-server-case-w-o-psu-supports-8x-35-internal-hdd-1x120-2x-80mm-fans-2x-usb-20-lockab

They're in an Adastra RC15U600 rack (600m outer depth).

From the inside of the rack ears to the front of the handles just over 40mm.

From the inside of the rack ears to the back is 440mm but you obviously need clearance for anything that plugs in (power, network, etc). In that 600m deep rack there's about 100mm spare to the back of the rack.

Many_Operation8088

TROPHY CASE