Been two weeks with the Balance One in our 25 person office and so far pretty good… we currently have a 10MB symmetrical EOC line that is less than desirable and it seems like we max out the bandwidth every once in a while which causes little throughput. Fortunately next week we get a new 50MB symmetrical fiber line installed so I am looking forward to seeing how the Balance One handles it.
I’m setting up PPTP User accounts for members of the team so they can access the file server from outside the office. Everyone has one password that has been assigned to them to access their email and I wish to use the same passwords for them for accessing the VPN. Problem is some special characters are disallowed and there seems to be a 12 character maximum for password.
Any chance the next firmware version is addressing this?
If not is it recommended to have just one account that people use? perhaps an alternative method?
If you do not have an LDAP or Radius server, then you would need to define the user accounts and passwords on the Balance unit itself.
You would need to create a username/password for each individual user, as the system will not allow multiple logins from the same account. This is also not very secure anyways, as you would not be able to identify who is actually logging in to your network.
We will take a look at allowing special characters and longer passwords.
On an unrelated note… It seems we are having some issues with throughput on the Balance One built in AP. To my knowledge this may be due to a large amount of noise since we are in a building with at least 20 different SSID’s displaying on a wifi analyzer. Would you recommend using a dedicated AP with the Balance One, such as the AP One 300m for increased throughput as well as range? If so, does the AP One handle noise from wireless networks better than the built in AP on the Balance One?
Noise is noise no matter what AP you are using. If range seems to be an issue, you could add an AP One 300M to the network.
You should also take advantage of the dual-band capabilities on the Balance One, this way any devices that support 5 GHz can connect via a much cleaner air space.
Another issue… the integrated AP in the Balance One and the AP One are on the same channel. I would like to change the channel of the AP One since it seems they are close enough that they could be interfering with one another. When I attempt to do this from the AP Controller the dropdown is grayed out and says: “Follow AP Profile”
I assume that these being on the same channel could affect throughput, correct? Is there a way to have the integrated AP in the Balance One be on 2.4 GHz frequency and the AP One 300m be on the 5 GHz only? Please let me know if there is a preferred config. Thanks
Thanks again for the call earlier. I wanted to make sure that you were able to setup the AP One separately from the Balance One to ensure them on different channels?
Hi Jason - Just wanted to give you the heads up that things have been running very well here. We have our new 50MB fiber line running with the Balance One as our router and 2.4 GHz AP and the AP One 300m handling the 5 GHz band, which is the majority of the clients in the office. I am contemplating adding one more AP for coverage.
Would you recommend another AP 300m? If so would the preferred setup be same SSID, separate channel? Any recommendations would be much appreciated.
Setting the SSID the same will give you the added benefit of roaming between the AP’s as if configured to separate SSID’s you would need to manually connect to the “secondary” SSID once you are out of range from the “Primary” SSID
