FWIW I'm noticing 29.1's proactive steering being more than just at association can cause a lot of client bouncing between APs if the AP steering is incorrect.   I have a space in my home where the AP strongly believes it's appropriate to steer to an upstairs AP, but the client sees that as -87dBm RSSI instead of -60 to the closest AP which happens to be more loaded. That takes throughput down from 400mbps to 90mbps and the client desperately wants to roam back to the primary AP. On 29.1 this is resulting in every 2-3 minutes trying to steer the client back to the other AP and the client being unhappy 30 seconds later and roaming back to the correct AP.   Just like before 29.x, I would highly highly recommend keeping band steering / client balancing OFF unless you notice issues with your clients. Modern Windows/Android/iOS clients are smart and look at the QBSS load element in the beacons to decide which AP is correct. AP-side steering is fraught with peril because how well the AP can hear the client may not correlate with how the client can hear the AP. ... View more

8x8 seems kind of moot unless you are meshing as there’s barely any WiFi 6 client chipsets beyond 2x2. Also the MR56 doesn’t do 160MHz or 80p80 and the comments here from Cisco makes it sound unlikely it would ever support that.  between that and a new chipset generation, I do expect the MR57 to be faster, but at the same time I think you’re right to be cautious. There are always newer chipsets and newer APs down the road and the history of first generation hardware has not really been kind to early adopters. I am very excited for WiFi 6E but this might be too early to adopt unless you’re really under a schedule constraint. ... View more

Wi-Fi 6 MRs might exhibit unexpected reboots (Wi-Fi 6 MRs) FYI there is a 27.7.1 now, fixing the above issue. I hit this pretty badly on my MR46 and MR56, where once or twice a day, both would reboot at the exact same time. ... View more

Looks great! So it’s the FragAttacks fixes plus the other bugfixes mentioned in 28.1, without being on a beta.     ... View more

FWIW as someone who’s done a lot of open source work relating to these chipsets, the MR55’s (Hawkeye v1) SoC, in addition to being Draft wifi 6, also had a number of known chipset bugs resulting in a bunch of wifi 5 class features being turned off too (in particular, most forms of beamforming are disabled, which also means things like MU-MIMO effectively don’t work well or at all).   So unfortunately in my experience, you will see a performance delta, probably on the order of 20% in the real world, between the MR55 and MR56 simply because of Hawkeye V2 SoC in the MR56 being better and not needing these mitigations. ... View more

@PhilipDAth I've noticed the same interop wise. Ironically almost every client that worked with WPA2-WPA3 personal transition mode also just works with WPA3. The handful of WPA2-only clients I had struggled to deal with a transitionary network.   I'm getting pretty tempted to segregate SSIDs to give me a WPA3 dedicated SSID. Even with PSKs, WPA3's fast transitions help a lot with video streaming when jumping between APs. WPA2 + 802.11r was great at that too but now with KRACK I'm still afraid to use that combo with PSK. ... View more

Yeah the key for second-hand Meraki ownership is that the original owner needs to cooperate in unclaiming the devices from their dashboard. It’s similar to how iPhones are activation locked to their original owner too. In general I’ve found that if you’re unable to establish that because the original business went under or original owners are MIA, you’re on your own.   It’s worth mentioning that the hardware warranty is forever tied to the first owner, and if you try to process an RMA, that’s the only address Meraki will be willing to ship to. Other than that, as a home office user with a limited budget, I’ve had generally good luck with saving a lot of money through second-hand, unclaimed Meraki hardware. ... View more

It’s worth remembering that 4x4 is important for beamforming too.... Beamforming requires using a pair of spatial streams to transmit the same signal with a phase offset. A 2x2 AP can only beamform in 1x1:1 mode, and considering most WiFi 6 clients are 2ss, IMO the 4x4 AP is the sweet spot. ... View more

the 45/55 used the “Hawkeye V1” chip from Qualcomm, also known as IPQ8078/8074.  These were followed by the second version of these chips, which were rebranded as Qualcomm Networking Pro. The official advertised difference is mainly that the second version does UL-OFDMA and UL-MU-MIMO.  With that said, other vendors have struggled with enabling many WiFi 5 features: 160MHz, DL-MU-MIMO, AP to client transmit beamforming (the receive direction works), and more. That leads me to suspect there might be more that is immature or problematic about these chips and it’s not just a matter of only supporting DL-OFDMA.  ... View more

@AlexP I believe this is the way Apple handles Bonjour sleep proxying, but recently it seems to have extended to more devices than just Apple TVs and HomePods that respond to ARPs on behalf of a sleeping client. It seems like if a client wants to go into deep sleep, it picks another awake client to answer on behalf of its IP.  ... View more

I remember someone telling me that Tesla establishes a VPN tunnel using some 192.168.X.0/24 subnet and if your LAN is using the same subnet it will screw with the routing.   It might be worth a different addressing scheme. I literally just today connecting a Model 3 to a new home with a MX68+MR46/MR56, bridged VLAN, no issues. ... View more

yeah slightly breaking 450 is what I’m seeing as well. I suspect the uplink stats may be inaccurate. ... View more

That’s news to me, I’ve only seen 450-500mbit through my MX68 on a gigabit link, tested just last week. ... View more

27.4 is now a stable release candidate! Well deserved IMO, the 27.3 and 27.4 releases have both been rock solid. Really a no brainer for WiFi 6 APs but even on my MR53 the performance has been more consistent.  ... View more

I’ve seen this discussed on Reddit as well, the theory being they are faulty. It seems like tapping/pushing/prying on the mount can make the whine appear or go away, and when it whines it’s in repeater mode. ... View more

Chipset and radio improvements go a long way in the real world! That MR42/MR52/MR53 generation of Wave 2 APs is honestly the tipping point that got me to leave my previous preferred wifi vendor. ... View more

I don’t want to get into it here but my Ubiquiti Dream Machine is more of a Nightmare Machine. I highly recommend doing some homework on reviews as it looks amazing on paper but it is so buggy.  if you’re looking for alternatives for the smaller MXes I honestly would suggest looking at pfsense or opnsense on a small firewall appliance (you can find many popular ones online).   But having been around the block a few times I am here because I want to use an affordable priced MX. It is just so elegant. But this appliance sizing is barely scaling with medium tier consumer internet in 2020.  ... View more

If Meraki is listening, this is definitely a problem for even home office owners.   These days we can find symmetric gigabit residential service for $50-60 a month, sometimes less. I think there’s two takeaway points here: The MX64 and 67 SoCs are actually significantly more powerful members of the same SoC families that power consumer routers, and many of those are more than capable of performing NAT and L3 routing at line speed. It would be great to have a mode that provides at least gigabit throughput NAT even if it’s not possible to do traffic shaping, DPI, IPS, and so on. For some of us pro home users, quite honestly I am okay stomaching the hardware cost for a MX250. But a MX250 3 year AdvSec license is an eye watering $16,000. That ongoing cost is a severe dealbreaker especially since from a Meraki standpoint, I bet a 5 person home office with a MX250 vs a 5 person home office with a MX64 is similar in cost. The cost of the MX250 license seems to bake in an assumption that it’s being used in a massive site with more users and inherently more support overhead.   I love love love everything else about the MX series, but as my sites start having gigabit available, users demand being able to download at gigabit speeds. ... View more

Yes absolutely, go for 27.3 if you have a Wifi 6 AP. Overall Wifi 6 performance is so much better compared to the 26.x series.   With regards to your channel situation, might be worth checking the RF spectrum view to see if other channels are actually better. Meraki's Auto RF does not enjoy hopping around unless there is an obviously better choice.   Finally, if you have enough overlapping coverage and 2.4GHz is hopelessly occupied, consider adding RX-SOP to your radio profile, but proceed carefully with that and with ample testing, as RX-SOP can considerably shrink cell radius. ... View more

It’s worth mentioning that Meraki generally includes an explicit warning in the release notes when a beta is particularly unpolished. Usually it says something like it’s an “early beta” and advises using different firmware. You can see such a warning on the earlier 15.x releases.   I honestly run most of my Meraki networks on Beta or Stable RC firmware and in a lot of ways I’ve found it to be improved compared to the latest stable release. ... View more

Has MS firmware also bifurcated between different models?   The MR view is trying to say that 26.8.1 is stable for the Wifi 6 APs as the 26.8.1 release specifically has bugfixes for those APs, while 26.6.1 is stable for all previous APs. ... View more

About 1/3 of my clients are AX — iPhones, 2020 iPad Pros, and Intel Ax200/201s.  ... View more

Endpoint AV and gateway security are complementary technologies, they are two layers of defense, not meant to substitute for each other.   As an example:   You need an endpoint AV because it’s easy to hide traffic from a network gateway. For example, if a virus uses a password protected ZIP file (or encryption) to download its payload, or even HTTPS , a gateway cannot detect that threat, but an endpoint AV can easily see the infected file as it’s being unpacked.   And an endpoint AV is potentially weak because a virus running on the endpoint can attempt to disable the endpoint AV, but because such a virus does not compromise your MX, it cannot disable protection on the MX. ... View more