Losing my mind. Added a UDM Pro upstream of my eero Max 7 mesh. Bridge mode fixed the wired unit, but both wireless satellites now drop every 30 to 60 seconds.
I had a setup that worked well for a long time. One eero Max 7 was connected by ethernet to a Google Fiber Fiber Jack and a 5 Gig plan, and two more eero Max 7 units in other rooms formed the mesh:
Google Fiber Jack → ethernet → eero Max 7 ("Hallway") → wifi → eero Max 7 ("Bedroom") and eero Max 7 ("Media Room")
In my pursuit of even better performance, I recently added a UniFi Dream Machine Pro between the Fiber Jack and the eeros, with a direct wired ethernet run to the Hallway unit. Everything broke immediately. After a week of debugging, I put the eeros in bridge mode, which restored the Hallway unit completely. The other two units now work for roughly 30 seconds, stop, then come back for another 30 seconds, apparently at random.
The failure pattern is drop-and-recover. Devices behind the two satellites fail on wifi and on ethernet
What I believe testing established:
- The internet connection is healthy. A laptop wired to the UDM Pro gets 914 down, 936 up, 2 ms idle latency rising only to 15 ms under load.
- The Hallway eero is healthy. A laptop wired to that unit gets 934 down, 933 up. Its ethernet, bridging, and upstream path are all fine.
- The fault is localized to the link between the satellites and the rest of the network. Simultaneous continuous pings from a wired desktop in the Media Room showed local and internet targets failing and recovering together. When packets do get through they are perfect: 1 ms to the UDM Pro, 9 to 11 ms to Google. Recovery packets arrived at 786, 2452, 2705, 2878, and 3268 ms, which I think is queued traffic flushing when a link comes back (?)
- I removed, factory reset, and re-added the Media Room unit. It worked perfectly for about two minutes, then failed and stayed offline for a long time again before coming back for 5-60 seconds at up to 300 Mbps or so and failing again for minutes, repeatedly. It's basically unusable because it keeps disconnecting so often and for so long.
What I believe I have already ruled out:
- Eero Bridge mode not applied (confirmed applied)
- Distance, building materials, and band steering (it fails on ethernet too, and nothing was moved and this Eero mesh system setup worked before)
- A mesh loop from three units (I unplugged the Bedroom unit with no change)
- IGMP Snooping (already off), Spanning Tree Protocol (set to disabled, no change), security posture (already Allow All)
My question for this sub: has anyone run 3+ eero Max 7 units in bridge mode behind a UDM Pro and seen wireless satellites drop on an interval like this? If so, was the fix on the UniFi side? Pretty much out of ideas