Tong Family

In this day and age some things just seem ridiculously complicated. But here are some notes

Zoom subscriptions

Well I’ve been trying for three months to move down a user level. It’s really impossible. If you go to billing amd choose two to one for instance it all seems to work but ona. Mobile device ion don’t see the confirm button way at the bottom so it never takes. Here is what you have to do

• First you have to go to your profile. They have for some reason buried all the administrative functions in the individual user interface. Then go to users.
• You need to find someone to demote to basic user from licensed. This has to match your reductions elsewhere (GitHub makes that way easier by merging these two)
• But you are not done yet then you go back to billing and reduce your licensed user count.
• Now you got thru not 1 but three screens asking you to accept. Make sure to scroll all the way down. They have confirm buttons way low and the screens are not optimized for mobile.

Awair incompatible with Unifi port MQTT port 8883

Yikes why do these iot apps use things like MQTT. But the awair needs port 8883 for egress (that is outbound). It claims it only initiates these connections. But apparently on a Unifi these ports are blocked because it’s used by the Unifi.

So you can’t use say a Unifi controller or a Unifi Dream machine on the same network as another MQTT client. This means that the Awair has to live on a separate virtual network. Basically you need a dedicated awair network.

Not as bad as the GreaterGOODs scale that doesn’t like special characters in the SSID. Or the LG television that doesn’t like 80MHz channels 5GHz channels. But it is a good reminder that random implementations of internet protocols is pretty horrible.

I just wish everything would use Web sockets as this would be much simpler and not have collisions like this. Then there aren’t these same side of outbound conflicts. Having the client device initiate always makes a lot of sense. But sitting on a port like this for some random device is kind of crazy and not very friendly. It means every install of awair needs its own network. And then having the work with other devices is impossible. Unless you forward packets between different VLANs

This makes some sense as Unifi itself apparently also uses this port 8883 for remote egress. I really don’t see why these sites don’t all use https instead for this. Then there is no chance of port collisions. And they had a network outage that gave to all kinds of error messages which are not helpful.

Finally their documentation which suggest just dumping the device on the open internet is really scary.

In reading about 8883, it’s used for MQTT for IoT applications.

I might just end up returning the device it’s so much trouble.