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Comment by dheera | Hacker News Reader

On my Unifi setup at home with multiple APs I had to disable 802.11r to get things to roam fast. I have Android and Linux laptop, wife has iPhone and MacBook.

With 802.11r on, things would disconnect for 60+ seconds before reconnecting. It was a constant frustration of "arrrrrrrggghhhh fucking connect damnit I'm standing a meter in front of the AP can't you fucking see it fuck fuck fuck just connect, it's right THERE, connect NOW, arghhh" and then it would completely disconnect (no wifi found) and then reconnect a minute later.

With 802.11r off things just roam smoothly. I guess the people who inventned the tech didn't test it thoroughly enough.

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It might be that UBNT has screwed up the settings when in 802.11r mode. I have 802.11r set up on my OpenWRT Ones and I'm seeing what appears to be A-OK roaming with my Linux laptop and Pixel 5a. I do also have DAWN installed (solely to populate the "hearing map") and umdns installed... but it's not clear to me if those are actually useful.

Unless they've reimplemented the whole damn thing since like 2018 or so, UniFi is OpenWRT with the serial numbers filed off, and UBNT is known to be not especially great at having good software on the APs. I had a square UAP-AC and then an AC-LITE and an AC-LR all running the official software for several years. While the management GUI seemed like it'd come in handy if you had to manage like a hundred APs, I wasn't impressed with either official support or the rest of the software.

They have come a very long way since the UAP-AC.

I've been using the U6-Pro backed by UCG-Max and couldn't be happier.

Yes - the software running on the standalone APs is still basically OpenWRT wrapped with a management layer. But UniFi has grown to a much larger system. All the router boxes are running Debian, for example (even those with a built-in AP).

> They have come a very long way since the UAP-AC.

I agree. The AC-LR and AC-LITE were way better than the -AC. That guy ran extremely hot and was dogshit at multicast. In contrast, the -LITE and -LR merely ran notably hot and were merely intermittently bad at multicast.

Loading up OpenWRT on the -LR and -LITE made them work quite a lot better (though -obviously- they still ran just as warm). Ditching them for the OpenWRT One was even nicer.

I've also been able to deploy UniFi for my parents and my wife's parents, and easily manage their setups remotely.

OpenWRT does that too, yeah.

Once you're not using default settings, here be dragons. In theory 802.11r is a standard. In practice enabling 802.11r puts you into the minority of users who do so. There's a lot less quality assurance coverage there.

You're at the mercy of UniFi not having any show stopping bugs (haha), the client device supporting 802.11r or at least tolerating it, and the interaction between UniFi and the client not having any show stopping bugs.

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