Tweaking Wireless
I’ve been tweaking the new wireless link this weekend. I also took some pictures and put them in the photos section.
What I thought was the maximum throughput on the radios was false. I had the third radio in the series acting as an access point. The processing power for NAT, DNS, and DHCP was robbing from the overall performance of the radio. In AP mode, the Bullet2 HP unit was able to push nearly 20Mbps. I took some time and threw the entire network… all four radios… into WDS mode and configured them all to be transparent bridges. The result was 25Mbps of throughput and that IS the TCP ceiling of these units. As soon as some more Bullet M2 HP units come in, I’ll upgrade the second portion of the link. Of course the Internet access I’ll be getting won’t be this fast but it sure is nice to access my workstation at these speeds.
I was also able to fiddle with 2.4Ghz channels to get the link running on a certain frequency. The only unique 2.4Ghz channels are 1, 6, and 11.
My next step… at least I hope… is to create a virtual OpenBSD machine on one of our VMware ESX servers to do QOS, routing, and throttling. Supposedly, when you put these Ubiquiti radios in WDS mode, they allow all network traffic to flow. (Edit: my machine’s MAC address showed up in the ARP table on the switch… we’re good!) I’m betting that I can assign different MAC addresses for machines on the link to different VLANs. Ergo, I can have my machine stay on a work VLAN and all other machines can go directly to the Internet without touching the private network.