Problems with Unifi?

If you're one of the few recent adopters of TM's Unifi service, you may be experiencing one (or more) of the following issues

• Webpages never finish loading
• Webpage text loads but images do not load or only load partially
• Nothing loads until you refresh several times
• You get numerous 404 error messages (not found)
• You get various 5XX error messages (time out, host did not reply, host not found)

First things first is to go check your router firmware version (the orange D-link hardware item) by keying into any browser the address of your router (by default is 192.168.0.1). You do not need to login - just look at the top left to see the firmware version. If you have firmwares 7.13 and above you may be affected by a DNS forwarding issue.

How to confirm? Open a command window in Windows (terminal in Mac or *nix) and do a simple nslookup to see if your DNS requests are forwarded properly. If no nslookup command is available, a ping test would yield similar results.

What is a DNS request?

On windows, you can try the command "nslookup www.google.com.my". You should get an immediate response which will look something like this which means the actual IP address of www.google.com.my is 75.125.135.94 .... if you key in those numbers, you'll end up at Google.

On the faulty D-link firmware, the results you get will look something like this. The screenshot below  does show the correct IP address because your PC caches (stores temporarily) all previously known resolved addresses. The main problem is the 2 second delay which causes most browsers to give up and display an error message (unless you press refresh).

To resolve this (without having to buy an alternative router) is either to call Unifi service and have them downgrade your router firmware to 7.09 or 7.12 (those so far seem to be unaffected by this bug) OR manually enter your own DNS settings into your network configuration. Since there are various tutorials on this online, I won't go into details about the steps required - just google "change dns windows" or whatever platform your are on (Mac/IOS/android)