Category: Ubiquiti

Aruba Switches and Trancievers

John Leave a comment

Vendors tend to lock down the type of transceivers you can use on their SFP/SFP+ and QSFP ports. They do this for a number of reasons but mainly in the spirit of support and quality (which I can understand). there are a number of guidelines around agreed upon by networking vendors that fall under Multi-Source Agreement (MSA). MSA specifications will dictate many physical characteristics, but not necessarily the electrical designs. For that reason, a transceiver may work in one switch/module, but not in another due to design differences not taken into consideration. Vendors will say that many low-cost products do not properly code the MSA required fields for type, distance, media type among other fields, or they may incorrectly identify the part, causing the switch to enable them with settings not appropriate for the type of transceiver inserted.

TL;DR it’s basically, use unsupported transceivers at your own risk and if it’s found to cause an issue, it won’t be supported.

I’ve got some 10gig going now in my home lab environment between my Aruba lab gear and Ubiquiti UDM-PRO, whilst it was pretty much plug and play on the Ubiquiti side (I am using their transceivers), on the Aruba I had to go and fiddle in the console to get it working. If you’re not managing via Aruba Central, it is a straight forward command.

Aruba-2930F# allow-unsupported-transceiver
Warning: The use of unsupported transceivers, DACs, and AOCs is at your own risk and may void support and warranty. Please see HPE Warranty terms and conditions.

Do you agree and do you want to continue (y/n)?

Hit Y to confirm
If you’re using Aruba Central, you’ll just also need to enable support mode.

Aruba-2930F# aruba-central support-mode enable
Aruba-2930F# allow-unsupported-transceiver
Aruba-2930F# write memory
Aruba-2930F# aruba-central support-mode disable

Once done, reboot your switch and the Transceiver will come online and begin to operate (unless it’s too cheap and faulty…), you can verify it’s there by issuing the following command

# show tech transceivers

Cmd Info : show tech transceivers

transceivers

Transceiver Technical Information:
 Port # | Type      | Prod #     | Serial #         | Part #
 -------+-----------+------------+------------------+----------
 10    *| SFP+SR    |       ??   | unsupported      |

In my case, I can see the transceiver but no information.

Adopt Unifi Access Point over Internet or VPN using SSH

John Leave a comment

If you’ve shipped some Ubiquiti Unifi Wireless access points to a remote site before adopting them or happen to have your controller on another network, you can log into them via SSH and point them to your Unifi controller. It performs discovery via basic L2 broadcast and DNS resolution of hostname unifi, if either of these methods do not reach a controller then you can follow these steps.

Get them powered on and then once the status led of your access point is steady white (or a steady amber for older Unifi access points) then that means it’s waiting for adoption. Grab the IP that was obtained via DHCP and then SSH into the Unifi access point using the default ubnt / ubnt username and password combo. If the AP was previously managed, then you’re going to need to get the username and password from the old controller which is under System Settings > Controller Configuration > Device SSH Authentication.

Once you log in, it will be best to perform a factory reset, so type in set-default to factory reset it first. Once the AP reboots you can then SSH back in and log in using the default username and password.  We can now use the following command to inform the AP of our controller

set-inform http://ip.or.fqdn.of.controller:8080/inform

Change the IP or FQDN of controller to the values appropriate for your network.  The unit will then reboot, you can reconnect via SSH and check it’s status by issuing a info which will display its status and whether it has connected to your controller.