I upgraded my Airrouter. But I don't see anything about the USB port on the Advanced configurations page.
The features page said "Added USB passthrough support to the Advanced Configuration page for certain devices with USB ports – Ubiquiti AirRouter and Mikrotik hAP AC Lite."
What is "passthrough" anyway? Would I be able to access say files on a thumb drive?
USB Passthrough means the this port would then supply 5v and could be used to charge or power a device attached to it. However, the drivers to enable a thumb drive or other USB devices to be functional are not configured.
I think the Airrouter's USB port's 5V is hard wired on. In any event, I have an old Linksys 5 port switch that runs off 5V, so I modified it with a USB cable as its power cord (only the ground and 5V lines are connected, but not the data lines) to power it off the Airrouter's USB port. It doesn't draw much current. This switch is doing the DtD distribution.
No, it was pulled from the release because we felt it wasn't ready yet. This release, as indicated in the release notes, will reset the distance setting to 60 km on any device that currently has it set to 0.
Before upgrading from the last stable release to this release, I had one NanoStation M2 connected to a GS105E switch with an Ethernet cable from both the primary and secondary ports. On the main port, I connected it to VLAN10, an untagged port, for LAN operation (laptop, RPi server, etc) and on the secondary port, I connected it to VLAN1 (tagged) which was connected to an RPi firewall and then out to my home Internet connection. After the upgrade, the switch ports were going nuts with traffic and I couldn't access the node through the VLAN10 port. I also checked to make sure PoE was disabled on the secondary port. See attachment for a pre-upgrade system diagram. Once I disconnected the secondary port, I could access the node locally, but of course could not connect the node to my Internet connection.
Do I need to get rid of the secondary port connection and move the tagged VLAN1 such that it is on the same port as the untagged VLAN10 to make this work, with both VLANs connected to the primary port?
Dave, yes the network ports now fully function and nanostations with 2 ports -- you only need 1 cat5 cable, which carries LAN (untagged), DtDLin (vlan 2) and WAN (vlan 1) on the single cat5. Both ports function this way now.
You can also daisy chain a device and look in advanced configuration to turn on/off POE passthough. Yesterday at a event, we had this for a relay station, it captured HD video from other nodes, and had 3+ video signals going back to command. The cat5 cables were configured:
Power POE -> main port NSM2 ; secondary port NSM2 -> main port NSM5 ; secondary port NSM5 -> 24v to 12v POE splitter -> ipCAM
No switches, no external weather proof box, except ipCAM mount with splitter inside. As long as the ipCAM isn't a power hog, it works great. We were streaming 6 ipCams into the orange county's sherrif's mobile command to dispatch for the event security in San Juan Capistrano yesterday.
That sounds great Joe! If both of the ports act the same, I'm a little surprised that I can't still use the primary for the LAN connection and the secondary for VLAN1, but I'll reconfigure my switch and get rid of the secondary cable and see what happens.
Were you able to power all of that with just the PoE module that comes with the NanoStations, or did you have to get one with a bit more punch? It looks like the one that comes with the NS don't have enough power for two.
The Nanostations act as if these 2 ports are an external dumb switch. This means that the same packets are going out both ports through 2 cat5 cables to your switch, and thus lots of confusion ensues. If you have a smarter switch, maybe device tree options would stop circular and duplicate traffic paths.
When 2 nanostations are daisy chained and a camera on the end, the devices power up in sequential order as POE passthrough is turned on. The 1st Nanostation has dhcp running first. The second nanostation starts up ~30 seconds after the 1st and dhcp on the 2nd doesn't function (can't be 2 dhcp servers). So what happens is the camera receives an IP address from the 1st nanostation even though it is connected to the 2nd nanostation, through these daisy chained dumb switches. And because the power up order is always known, we can be assured the camera will always work and have the IP address and service advertisement on the 1st Nanostation.
Just to confirm in this scenario, does the 2nd node actively look for another DCHP server on the wire, or is this an effect of the internal switching not passing DHCP requests between ports?
Ian
A second DHCP server must have the "force" option set for it to come up, "Forces DHCP serving on the specified interface even if another DHCP server is detected on the same network segment". AREDN does not have this option set, consequently a second DHCP server will detect the first and not function.
It is problematic if both nodes are on a real external dumb switch and powered up together, it could be a race which node's DHCP gets control. Then, it's not a given which node the service advertisements need to be made from. With the daisy chain nodes, the second is powered up only after the first node has booted and has DHCP control of this network (extending though the daisy chained nodes).
In regards, to POE brick used. We did have to use a power supply with more capacity than what comes with the Nanostation. Clarke KI6IZE found POE splitters with built in 24v to 12v conversion rated at 12v @ 2A for the 12v camera. When we bench tested, the camera would repeatedly go into initialization mode and start spinning when we didn't have sufficient power capacity.
On my Airrouter, my old trick of editing the /etc/auredn_include/swconfig file to make 2 of the Ethernet ports be DtD no longer worked for me. Changed the line under the line option vlan '2' to become option ports '0t 1t 2t' and removed port 2 from another line away from vlan 0 But this didn't work (after rebooting) as I did not get a pair of DtD ports....
Tried commenting out the lines about vlan '1' but I lost connectivity except thru the RF link. At this point I reflashed the firmware and left the swconfig file alone, and dug out an Ethernet switch to use to get multiple DtD ports. I have four DtD AREDN nodes connected together.
3.19.3.0 HAPACL Update with 5GHz Access Point Enabled
I have a user who had difficulty upgrading a HAP ac Lite to 3.19.3.0 from a nightly verion (v. unknown) until he disabled the 5GHz Access Point. Seems that it went through the upgrade with all of the messages, but simply didn't seem to take. I have not verified with another unit yet. Anyone else experienced this?
running the LAN AP with encryption runs a program "wpad-mini" which consumes ~500k of file space. More RAM will be consumed, but still plenty of space on a 64MB RAM device. Could this just be another symptom where it needs to be rebooted just before the upgrade. I suspect something is just not happening to free up RAM in the kernel.
Congratulations and thanks very very much to all for the effort that went into this new release.
- Don - AA7AU
The features page said "Added USB passthrough support to the Advanced Configuration page for certain devices with USB ports – Ubiquiti AirRouter and Mikrotik hAP AC Lite."
What is "passthrough" anyway? Would I be able to access say files on a thumb drive?
I think the Airrouter's USB port's 5V is hard wired on. In any event, I have an old Linksys 5 port switch that runs off 5V, so I modified it with a USB cable as its power cord (only the ground and 5V lines are connected, but not the data lines) to power it off the Airrouter's USB port. It doesn't draw much current. This switch is doing the DtD distribution.
Before upgrading from the last stable release to this release, I had one NanoStation M2 connected to a GS105E switch with an Ethernet cable from both the primary and secondary ports. On the main port, I connected it to VLAN10, an untagged port, for LAN operation (laptop, RPi server, etc) and on the secondary port, I connected it to VLAN1 (tagged) which was connected to an RPi firewall and then out to my home Internet connection. After the upgrade, the switch ports were going nuts with traffic and I couldn't access the node through the VLAN10 port. I also checked to make sure PoE was disabled on the secondary port. See attachment for a pre-upgrade system diagram. Once I disconnected the secondary port, I could access the node locally, but of course could not connect the node to my Internet connection.
Do I need to get rid of the secondary port connection and move the tagged VLAN1 such that it is on the same port as the untagged VLAN10 to make this work, with both VLANs connected to the primary port?
Thanks,
Dave K3GX
You can also daisy chain a device and look in advanced configuration to turn on/off POE passthough. Yesterday at a event, we had this for a relay station, it captured HD video from other nodes, and had 3+ video signals going back to command. The cat5 cables were configured:
Power POE -> main port NSM2 ; secondary port NSM2 -> main port NSM5 ; secondary port NSM5 -> 24v to 12v POE splitter -> ipCAM
No switches, no external weather proof box, except ipCAM mount with splitter inside. As long as the ipCAM isn't a power hog, it works great. We were streaming 6 ipCams into the orange county's sherrif's mobile command to dispatch for the event security in San Juan Capistrano yesterday.
Joe AE6XE
Were you able to power all of that with just the PoE module that comes with the NanoStations, or did you have to get one with a bit more punch? It looks like the one that comes with the NS don't have enough power for two.
Dave K3GX
When 2 nanostations are daisy chained and a camera on the end, the devices power up in sequential order as POE passthrough is turned on. The 1st Nanostation has dhcp running first. The second nanostation starts up ~30 seconds after the 1st and dhcp on the 2nd doesn't function (can't be 2 dhcp servers). So what happens is the camera receives an IP address from the 1st nanostation even though it is connected to the 2nd nanostation, through these daisy chained dumb switches. And because the power up order is always known, we can be assured the camera will always work and have the IP address and service advertisement on the 1st Nanostation.
Joe AE6XE
It is problematic if both nodes are on a real external dumb switch and powered up together, it could be a race which node's DHCP gets control. Then, it's not a given which node the service advertisements need to be made from. With the daisy chain nodes, the second is powered up only after the first node has booted and has DHCP control of this network (extending though the daisy chained nodes).
Joe AE6XE
On my Airrouter, my old trick of editing the /etc/auredn_include/swconfig file to make 2 of the Ethernet ports be DtD no longer worked for me. Changed the line under the line option vlan '2' to become option ports '0t 1t 2t' and removed port 2 from another line away from vlan 0 But this didn't work (after rebooting) as I did not get a pair of DtD ports....
Tried commenting out the lines about vlan '1' but I lost connectivity except thru the RF link. At this point I reflashed the firmware and left the swconfig file alone, and dug out an Ethernet switch to use to get multiple DtD ports. I have four DtD AREDN nodes connected together.