Comment by slig
17 hours ago
I have a hard time believing anyone would actually use this versus self-hosting headscale in a discarded ThinkCentre and running it from a closet.
17 hours ago
I have a hard time believing anyone would actually use this versus self-hosting headscale in a discarded ThinkCentre and running it from a closet.
Not sure if you’re serious but reeks of “you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially”
Not serious, and you got it.
Obligatory: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
I’m in the market for a solid travel router, and my home network is all Unifi gear. This is a no brainer, especially with the built-in Teleport support.
I run OpnSense, Wireguard, hooked up to third party WiFi access points, and I had to do a lot of configuration and work that I wouldn't have had to do if I had just bought Ubiquiti equipment.
I did save money, a really significant amount of money.
Obviously, yes, I am capable of going through the work that eliminates my need for this product. I have no trouble configuring Wireguard and setting it up on my client devices and running through all that.
But it was a lot of work to get to this point and I had to spend a lot of time learning how to do that, even as a person who is already technical. Wireguard in particular took me a solid half a day to build understanding and get it configured.
If I was a little bit richer and I went back in time I'd probably just buy all Unifi. Actually if I went back in time I think with my same levels of wealth I'd probably just buy Unifi and save some precious time.
This specific device does seem like a really nice extension of their product line.
The catch is figuring out what's going to stick around and what won't.
I have a Ubiquiti EdgeRouter Lite that's a little over ten years old. At the time, it was revolutionary in its ability to pump a whole lot of data over a cheap device with a lot of features - but a lot of those features weren't available in the GUI at all; you had to go CLI and learn Vyatta (of which it was a fork) to do them. It's been updated over the years and is now much easier to use as the web interface exposes a lot more functionality, but it's not part of Unifi (and never will be).
Early on, I looked at and even tried one of their AP's. 100 Mbps wired uplinks for N wireless? No thanks. Even the one that I got to test with had absolutely abysmal range. Say what you will about TP-LINK generally, but their Omada unified control system had AP's that actually worked in my house. So the early Unifi stuff wasn't anything special, and based on how they had dropped the ball on so much of their early hardware (the EdgeRouter Lite had its software on an internal USB drive that, out of warranty, failed in a way that I was only able to diagnose with a serial console cable - at least it had a port so I could monitor it during boot, and searching for the error messages found a way to replace the thumbdrive and reload the software) I had no reason to go with them.
If I were setting someone up today, with all new gear, I might go Unifi, but I have no reason to spend any time at all replacing a system that works just fine.
Time is your most precious commodity.