Hi,

for years I've had trouble connecting my TSU9800 to not-so-ancient wireless hardware.
For example, I've had no success with the (German) Fritz!Box 7590 and 7690 DSL routers, but I managed to get a DD-WRT flashed Linksys WRT1900ACS working for the past several years, WPA2 and all...

However, I'm currently replacing everything with Ubiquiti UniFi devices (starting with a Dream Router 7) and again it looks like I would have no luck connecting the TSU9800.

By any chance, has anyone had any luck connecting 9800s to a UniFi network?
I've tried creating a dedicated 2.4GHz network, "Force Wifi 4", Open or WPA2, and several combinations of the available compatibility options. No Luck.
Since the "Open" option also did not work, I guess it's at least not because of incompatible encryption settings.
I would really like to not keep the old Linksys router around just to connect the Pronto to it...

Sebastian

I set up a separate SSID for my TSU9400 years ago by using an access point made by TP-LINK hardwired to the router. No DHCP and same subnet as the main network.

TL-WA850RE
WPA-PSK
TKIP
2.4GHz
SSID pronto

channel 1
channel width 20 MHz

Thanks for your feedback!
The TL-WA850RE is a repeater, right?
The device I found under that name seems to be around since 2015 - in the context of this topic, this classifies as "ancient" ;)

As I said, I had it working on the Linksys router (which seems to be more recent than the TP-Link device, since it supports 5GHz/2.4GHz dual band, 802.11ac and other stuff).
However there seem to be issues with all/most/some recent generations' devices.

If anyone found a way to get this working with Ubiquiti please enlighten me.
Running a separate Wifi access point only to support the Pronto is my least favourite option.

Here's a suggestion. Take a Raspberry Pi (recommend Pi4) and create a WEP access point and ensure that you only allow connections from the MAC address of your Prontos.

Here's one article I found.
[Link: instructables.com]
[Link: raspberrypi.stackexchange.com]

I have not done the above as of yet but I plan to try it out soon. I will use a Pi4 or higher as the Pi3 shares wired connectivity with the USB and only gives around 330mbps for network. However, any older device on WEP is probably no more than 54mbps IIRC.

I currently have a PakEdge WAP54G that runs all my Prontos. Unfortunately, I had to allow Wireless devices on this SSID to connect to other wireless devices on my network. At one point, this was my network. I've since moved on to Wifi5 for all other equipment. Only the Prontos connect the the WAP54G

Thanks, Lyndel!
I still have the option to keep the Linksys WRT for the Pronto network, but the original plan was to get rid of all the old equipment.

I have a Pi 3 available for testing, maybe I'll give it a shot and see if it warrants upgrading to a newer Pi model.
At least the Pi is only a fraction of the size of the WRT and most likely draws less power.
I would have liked the option to power this thing via PoE out of the box, but apparently this requires an additional "HAT" which comes with a tiny fan.

Sebastian

The PI3 should be sufficient for what you desire. You could add a POE hat with no issues.

I personally don't use POE here in the home. Maybe I should but I've never messed with the POE injectors and all the other stuff. My switches are all standard unmanaged. I run a mix of 1GB and 2.5GB switches in the remote locations but have a 10GB switch in the rack.

I'm fortunate in that I have a 26U server rack and a home run. I only have 3-4 PIs running in the house and they are spread all over the place. I personally like the PI Zero 2Ws as they have same CPU as PI3 but alas only 512GB of RAM. All my ancillary Pronto stuff is running on Zero 2Ws or on a 1GB RAM Pi 4. I have a couple of Pi 5s that I'm playing with and a large stockpile of Pi3/4.

I used to have the Zero 2Ws on the WEP network but I've recently moved to different network SSID as Bullseye was the last release I could use WEP with. I've not found a good way to use WEP with the new Trixie OS.

Over time the Pronto seems slow compared to other things so I've offloaded some work from the Pronto to the PIs. For example, all the string parsing for my Marantz preamps is done on the Pi via some DenonProxy software I wrote. My DenonReceiver pronto library now talks to the proxy. With this offloading, I've ventured out into creating various Surround Pages to control channel levels, etc. These things were much slower when the proxy was not around.

What I did was go on eBay and bought an old cheap access point. Added it to my network and set it up only for my Prontos.

And to make things safer, you can limit access to only the MAC addresses of the Prontos. The only caveat is that if you flip out the Pronto, you will be scratching your head going why won't it connect. Been there, done that.

Just to clarify: the reason I opened this thread was my hope, that the Ubiquiti stuff was more common in the US than the Fritz!Box routers (which, it feels like, are in every household here in Germany ;).

With that I hoped that someone here may have found a solution to connect the Pronto devices to a Ubiquiti access point (they do offer a lot of compatibility settings) - but apparently not.

What puzzles me is that, despite all the standards around networking and wifi, there seems to have been some change in "newer" wifi chipsets(?) which prevents connecting the Pronto even if the access point runs in 802.11b/g mode.
As I mentioned earlier - it's apparently not even about encryption since even an open wireless LAN is not working anymore.
We'll probably never find out what changed there.

Keeping an old access point around for the Pronto(s) is definitely an option, but it wouldn't be my preferred one.
I would rule out buying new old stuff to replace the old old stuff - I would just keep my Linksys router then for as long as it works.
I will try so set up an RPi as access point, because it uses less space and power.
Also, IIRC, I already did that once a couple of years ago out of curiosity.

Lyndel, why are you still using WEP? At least the TSU9800 is working fine using WPA2.

FYI, though it did longer than expected due to some weird behaviour (bug?), I've managed to set up the Pi as access point.
Lyndel, thanks again for the URLs you provided above. I tried to use those as reference, but it turned out that they're pretty much outdated and that it's actually a lot easier to set up now.

I started from scratch by downloading the "Raspberry Pi Imager" tool and flashing the the latest(? - I guess that's what this thing does) image. I think Trixie is the current version's name.

I originally configured a wifi connection (which worked), but it's probably best to start with an ethernet connection since we will be reconfiguring the wifi interface.

One booted and logged in, update everything ("apt-get update; apt-get dist-upgrade" - use sudo if applicable).

Then NetworkManager can be used to set up a "Hotspot" for the wifi interface, sharing the ethernet interface's connection:

nmcli connection add type wifi ifname wlan0 con-name ap-wlan0 autoconnect yes ssid pronto
nmcli con mod ap-wlan0 802-11-wireless-security.pmf 1
nmcli con mod ap-wlan0 802-11-wireless.mode ap 802-11-wireless.band bg ipv4.method shared
nmcli con mod ap-wlan0 wifi-sec.key-mgmt wpa-psk
nmcli con mod ap-wlan0 wifi-sec.psk 123456789
nmcli con mod ap-wlan0 802-11-wireless.channel 9
nmcli con mod ap-wlan0 wifi-sec.proto wpa
nmcli con mod ap-wlan0 wifi-sec.pairwise tkip
nmcli con mod ap-wlan0 ipv4.addresses 10.0.0.1/24
nmcli con mod ap-wlan0 802-11-wireless.mac-address-randomization never
nmcli con mod ap-wlan0 802-11-wireless.hidden yes
nmcli con up ap-wlan0
nmcli con mod ap-wla0 connection.autoconnect yes

The "802-11-wireless-security.pmf 1" (Protected Management Frames) setting might be optional depending on the Pi model - it was required in my case otherwise I would get some weird timeout error from wpa_supplicant when bringing the connection up.
The configured value of "1" disables PMF.

NetWorkManager takes care of all the rest; addresses are assigned to clients via DHCP from the configured 10.0.0.0/24 range.
No need to dive into hostapd and dhcpd configuration files :-)

Thank you very much for the instructions, especially for trixie. I wanted to setup wep instead of wpa but will use the above as a guide. I don't see a step above to set the country. Is that not required or does it default?

I never setup the Pronto with WPA2 as on the 9600 connections early on were spotty and took longer to negotiate.

Good question - I think it defaulted to something reasonable, but at some point I also explicitely set it during troubleshooting:

iw reg set COUNTRY_CODE eg. iw reg set US

Apparently you can also set it using raspi-config and then navigate to Localisation / WLAN Country.

For configuring WEP instead of WPA, see the NetworkManager documentation:
[Link: networkmanager.dev]

You might want to disable (2) the powersave for wifi here.
[Link: networkmanager.dev]

That's always a PITA on the Pi Zeros. I actually have a service that I loaded on earlier releases that would turn it off on boot.

=================================
wifi-powersave@service
=================================
[Unit]
Description=Set WiFi power save %i
After=sys-subsystem-net-devices-wlan0.device

[Service]
Type=oneshot
RemainAfterExit=yes
ExecStart=/sbin/iw dev wlan0 set power_save %i

[Install]
WantedBy=sys-subsystem-net-devices-wlan0.device

=================================
wifi-powersave-on.sh
=================================
#!/bin/bash
sudo systemctl stop [email protected]
sudo systemctl disable [email protected]
sudo cp [email protected] /etc/systemd/system
sudo systemctl enable [email protected]
sudo systemctl start [email protected]

Good point, thanks for the tip!
So far I was just testing the setup on a Pi that already had a different purpose, so it's not running "productive" at the moment.
I'll need to get another one that can be permanently used for the Pronto wifi.