Upgraded to AmpliFi Alien
A few days ago, I was running some speed tests on my iPhone 12 Pro, and noticed that the WiFi speed with connected to my Apple TimeCapsule and AirPort Extreme was about half that of connecting directly to the Xfinity xFi gateway. Given that I wanted a little more security and cohesive networking, I don't want to put everything on the Xfinity box, so it was time to upgrade my WiFi.
I've been looking at the AmpliFi Alien for quite a while, but haven't had a great reason to change - given that my TimeCapsule was also my backups with Time Machine. So first I had to move to Backblaze for backups, and that turned out to be a great move for me.
I wanted to have a place that all my versions of all my files would be stored, and with the "Forever" option at Backblaze, I can get just that. It's a little more per month, but it's exactly what I wanted, as I now have one place for all the versions of all the files on this, my main machine. It's just wonderful.
With the iOS app, I can now have access to these files - and have the peace of mind that I'll be able to look back in time for those things I might have been foolish enough to delete. I honestly don't expect to have a major data loss, but that's just when things like that happen. 🙂
With my backup issue solve, the Alien mesh arrived and it was time to install it. First, it's a beautiful piece of tech - the display is amazing, and the iOS app is amazing in what it can do, measure, all the goodies that I'm sure a current Apple router would do - if they made them. But alas, they don't. But as easy as it was to set things up, I ran into a problem with my VPN to The Shop, and that was a real pickle.
Removing the DNS Cache on AmpliFi Alien
Everything was working great - the speed tests done at the router were showing me the exact speeds that I was expecting with my Xfinity Gigabit service - a bit too asymmetrical for me, but I'm working on that, and hope that Gigabit Pro, or AT&T Fiber will be available with more symmetrical numbers, and maybe more speed. But that's another story.
The mesh was easy to set up... and upgrade the cylinders to the latest version. Almost like the Sonos set-up and control... very simple, very clear. Nice. I had to make sure all my machines had the access point in their lists, and all were talking and happy... interesting point - I had to reboot my Apple TV4K because it had the old networking (wired) DHCP address. It wouldn't refresh normally. No big deal.
But the real issue was with the OpenVPN client for The Shop. Everything seemed fine with accessing most all services, but the DNS for the shop.com domain for work weren't being resolved. Wow... OK... let's dig into this. Turns out - the Aline Router caches DNS so that it can offer you the control address of http://amplifi.lan/ from your web browser.
That's a nice touch, but if it means that the changes from the VPN didn't take... well... it was simple enough to change.
- Go to http://amplifi.lan/ and login with the password you just set up - this is pretty easy, and while it's not obvious, a simple google search pulled this up.
- Check the Bypass DNS Cache in the list and save - this is really not a bad idea in today's DNS hijacking environment, but it really has to be a little smarter about the existence of VPNs in the world.
- Shut down all networking - disconnect from the VPN, turn off WiFi on the box, unplug networking - make sure it gets to a clean state.
- Plug in network, turn on WiFi, connect to VPN - in the logic order, start the networking back up so that things are rolling again.
- Edit /etc/hosts to add amplifi.lan - this is just to get us back to the state where we can go to http://amplifi.lan/ for the control of the router, and it's as simple as just adding a line to the /etc/hosts file where we just use the address of the Gateway, or base router in any of the DHCP address blocks we have on any of the local machines:
192.168.153.1 amplifi.lan amplifi
At this point, it's all working as it should. The Router is safe and secure, and very fast. Has great diagnostics built-in to it, and available from the iOS app... and it's silent. No spinning drives like the TimeCapsule.
There may come a time that I don't need to worry about the VPN issues, or maybe they will update the firmware to more intelligently cache DNS data... that would be nice... but until then, this is exactly what I'd hoped. 🙂