HeathenLab PieFedWhat's your opinion on Ubiquiti/Unifi gear?
early_riserI bought into the ecosystem while taking my networking cert classes back in 2017. They were much cheaper than Cisco gear for business-grade networking, and overall I’ve been happy with them.
Their security offerings are locally managed, and you can make local accounts, but I just bought a NAS from them and I had to sign in with my ubiquiti account first before I could make a local account, and it seems the cloud account has some privileges that you can’t give to local super admins.
So now I’m having second thoughts. I figure since it’s enterprise-grade stuff they can’t really make it cloud-dependent like you see on the consumer side since a lot of companies need air-gapped networks. On the other hand, on those occasions that I didn’t have internet access and hadn’t yet made a local-only account, I was locked out, so…
Regarding the NAS specifically, I use a TruNAS system at work and it works well enough on a rack server, but since it uses ZFS I don’t know it would be good for home use. What alternatives are there?
Are there any truly FOSS networking options? I figure especially on the switching side you need purpose-built hardware, right? There aren’t generic motherboards with 48 network ports you can buy.
I like my Unifi setup, I’m just scared of a rug pull.
Not a fan. Absolutely not.
They had multiple security incidents which they kept under the rugs for a long time, they have the tendency to EOL devices without warning (which then means you need to replace your sometimes 9month old device or your whole enviroment can’t be updated), their lock-in into their ecosystem is much more complete as they can’t be used properly without their enviroment.(e.g. Omada devices can work without the Omada stuff, with Unifi you will always need a controller for some functions).
So if you realy need SDN features like Unifi look at Omada,otherwise Mikrotik is a solid alternative. (And OPNsense for firewall)
TPLink had security issues all the same
Absolutely, but unlike Ubiquiti they did not keep them under the rug that long. (Nevertheless: Both are shit for firewalling. Put a OPNsense before it?)
Actually unified got a new firewall package that works great
Still mediocre compared to OPN/pfsense, IPfire, VyOs,etc.
I agree, but it’s waaaaaaaay better than it was
OpenWRT?
It isn’t really a vendor but it is Foss. It isn’t as robust as vendor solutions but the advantage is that it will run anywhere.
People seem to love it. But it’s highly proprietary and there seems to be planned obsolescence built into their model
Try stay away from their cheap consumer side stuff, they underspec the hardware and fill it with (useful) bloat that the hardware can barely run.
Wifi: Neat
Anything else: Havent tried.
Abstracting so much away from the admin by automagically comnfguring everything is neat but also dangerous as you’ll never know what it has configured for you.
That’s not really how it works
How so?
Exactly how I have it at home right now.
I’ve run OPNsense, PFsense, OpenWRT, and high end consumer routers and I’ve found Unifi the most stable. I’m also less able to screw it up and I’ve had to divert functions to VMs because I couldn’t do it on my UDM. But having Internet service fail over with notifications that the normies in the house can understand is helpful. Then being able to find the WI-FI password for the Iot network from the app is helpful. VLANS by port through a pretty simple WebUI is helpful. Their handing of power (do they support NUT yet?) and redundant links is less good. I get errors when I have two routes between switches like I broke something. I’ve brought the network down due to STP not stopping loops but I also don’t know what the hell I’m doing. I’d do it again though.
For NAS, ceph storage plus NextCloud plus WebDAV has been good lately but I’m sure I’m leaving performance on the table. It’s just hard to break.
I’m in the process of updating m homelab. Threw out the qnap nas, replaced it with a homebuild nas on Truenas (4x8TB HDD, 4x1TB SSD). Replacing my ubiquity edgerouter pro 8p with a Mikrotik hEX refresh. About a 10x speedup for throughput, 20x smaller, 1/4 power consumption. Next I’ll be looking to replace my edgeswitches. I can run them stand alone, so there’s no rush.
I am not going to buy myself deeper into ubiquity. I’ll just try to optimize for the current needs.
If you want true foss, run pfsense or opsense on your own hardware.
I like them. Got the whole house set up with it. Yeah, big corp IT gear will have security risks. I used PoE setups to not need to run electrical to the WAPs, used an AirMax directional antenna to get wifi at an outbuilding without needing to run cable or a powerful outdoor WAP for mesh or whatever broadcasting my wifi all over the neighborhood. Works great, stable, a bit fiddly to set up but once it’s set up it’s golden. I recommend buying used off ebay for all gear except the cloud key controller.
I’ve been using Unifi APs since 2017 and they are fantastic. I control them with the Unifi Network Application via docker compose. Incredibly well priced APs that fit right into the ‘prosumer’ market for sure and still powerful enough to do SMB no problem.
As for FOSS Networking options - OPNsense FTW !!! It’s an open source firewall/router based on FreeBSD and extremely performant, feature rich, stable and secure… Absolutely love it, it’s the core of my network.
In regards to ZFS, I’ve been running a ZFS system of one type or another at home since 2013/2014… Totally valid & usable for home networks, many many do use ZFS storage systems. I’m very preferential to OpenMediaVault which is a NAS OS, but based directly on Debian! Debian is basically the Linux OS you want for reliability but paired with OMV’s gui - makes having a custom NAS easy.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
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