Comment by oceanplexian
2 days ago
I stopped buying Ubiquiti when I reset my UDM Pro and took it to another house without internet access, and it refused to "activate" without an Internet Connection or a phone app connection. Seems they are more interested in selling a lifestyle rather than actual production network equipment.
I stopped buying them when I saw users posting on reddit that they were logging in to their systems and seeing other peoples camera feeds and networks.
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/ubiquiti-user...
Im not excusing Ubiquiti here, I agree thats pretty annoying.
However a UDM pro is a router (as well as other things). The expectation is that it is connected to WAN.
Unifi switches and access points etc do not have the same online requirement.
You can't actually configure the wan connection fully without internet connectivity (at least last i checked).
This meant for instance if your WAN required VLAN like New Zealand you couldn't actually set it up without another router. Their fix is to add 1 more option to the WAN configuration options rather than the full suite of WAN configuration options you get once it's talked home.
The partial fix does make it clear that the philosophy of "you must talk to the mothership" is a guiding one that ubiquiti sticks to.
What are you using instead?
New mikrotik gear is also a great option.
OPNsense.
If I ditched my modest ubiquiti gear I’d probably try out https://www.alta.inc/ Because https://chrisbuechler.com/
I swapped my edgerouter lite (ERLite-3) to an Alta Labs Route10 recently after moving to an ISP that uses PPPoE. Unfortunately the Cavium silicon inside the ERL cannot do hardware offloading for ipv6+vlan+pppoe concurrently, so I had to find a new router. The Route10 is a nice piece of kit, but the software is still very immature, and absolutely requires a controller to manage. I really wish that I could run VyOS on it, but for now it does the job and will probably be absolutely fine for 99% of people.
This looks super interesting, thank you
I’m also curious what other prosumer network hardware companies have good products?
I use TP link Omada gear and its a been very good replacement to unifi. I use it both personally & manage a side gig venue’s network. I have lots of vlans & even run dante & ndi with no issues. Replaced a Unifi system it was so buggy. DHCP reserve IPs failed, spotty issues with artists phones & the mixer board to mix their in-ears etc. I’ve setup IPSec tunnel to AWS VPC even pretty easy.
Using a pi4 for last 4 years on poe running their management docker container. So solid! I’d recommend the pi over buying their hardware device mamager, its way slower.
I like Mikrotik routers, and their other products look good too. They are often discussed on HN if you want to search for a range of opinions. I do find that their software can be confusing, but that may also be to do with the number of options.