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by mrweasel 107 days ago
It seems like a pretty tall order, but I really want an open source access point controller daemon that knows how to provision and manage a wide variety of APs from different manufacturers.

So you'd have one services that can provision Ubiquity, MikroTik, TPLink and other APs and manage the clients.

3 comments

Alternately, run OpenWRT on the APs themselves, and then you just need one provisioning protocol.
Does it support seamless roaming of clients between group of APs?

Last time I've tried, it was not supported by any open source solution.

Seamless WiFi roaming is mostly a client decision. The best you can do on AP is to:

a) optimize signal strength for coverage (stronger signals aren't always better in multi-AP deployment);

b) provide hints via 802.11k/v/r to help clients make, hopefully, better decisions;

c) forcefully drop and disassociate clients when signal is weak enough.

But if the client has bad WiFi implementation, there's nothing much you could do.

OpenWRT currently supports 802.11k/v/r, but optimizing coverage by adjusting signal strength and channels is left for experienced users to deal with manually. There is the are where some commercial offerings will do, but the result greatly varies. AFAIK there's no ideal system anyway coz physics is hard.

Well AFAIK the core seamless roaming in Unifi is using hostapd, which is the same AP software you use on OpenWrt. See 802.11r Fast Transition.

I think it should even be possible to get seamless roaming between Unifi and OpenWrt with correct configuration of hostapd.

Now that would be interesting! Multi-vendor support is on the radar, but haven't started looking into it much yet.
I would love to have some way to configure the USW Flex Minis without the controller software. I can't find any other small PoE powered switches for a similar cost.