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Comment by creyes | Hacker News Reader

I designed/deployed a decent sized Meraki network about 4 years ago - at the time it was one of the larger full-stack Meraki networks that exists. An 11 site school district with the edge, all idfs, ap's, phones and at a a later point some of their cameras.

Meraki still thinks of themselves a startup, but they have these "uh-oh's" all the time. Random bad firmware that turns off the 5g channel on the MR42's. A DPI "upgrade" that blocked ALL SSL traffic (which at this point is basically all traffic). Their solution was always to try "beta" firmware... in production... in the middle of state-mandated online testing.

I was a huge advocate for them but at some point it's gonna be hard for me to keep recommending them. They're so excited about new features but really fail about 1) fixing bugs and 2) ensuring robustness. The "fail fast fail often" mentality really shouldn't work with critical infrastructure

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Ubiquiti (unifi) was very much like this back then too, and to this day still breaks stuff every update. They're getting better now but running a large site or multiple large sites was a constant game if whack a mole trying to figure out which firmware works best on which equipment.

I have heard similar stories to yours about meraki and that's what swayed the decision to just go ubiquiti since it's less expensive.

We removed almost every piece of Ubiquiti equipment from our network because of the quantity and severity of bugs in their products. For example: Disabling a port on Edgerouters will grey out the port in the UI, but it doesn't actually stop traffic from passing through the port.

I also have no love for how some features are only available via command line while others are only available in the UI. This also differs depending on what product line you're using. Pick one strategy and stick to it.

What are you using instead now? Genuinely curious.

We're nearly 100% Juniper on the network side. The PtP and PtMP equipment we were using from Ubiquiti is now 95% Mimosa. The only Ubiquiti products that I like are Airfiber 24's and that's only because no one else offers an alternative.

Isn't Ubiquiti supposed to be he high-quality "do one thing really really well" prosumer brand?

Thats terrible to hear their crap blows up. Everybody says to upgrade away from D-Link and Asus to the Ubiquiti stuff to get rock-solid pro-quality home network.

Sounds like I'm just as bad off with the consumer stuff.

Anything that receives 8 firmware updates per year is a risky thing to put into mission critical service.

It is getting better, I can say the last few unifi updates I did involved much less butt pucker than previously, and they were done to get new features not because of necessity.

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