Hacker News Reader

Comment by johnbellone | Hacker News Reader

I agree. I purchased some Ubiquity gear a few months back after a condo purchase, and ran into few problems:

- UniFi brand works well for setup, but the cloud controller is necessary for command/control management outside of iOS/Android app.

- EdgeRouter is not a UniFi product and does not act as a cloud controller.

- EdgeRouter X does not deliver 48V PoE; upgrade was needed to power the AC-PRO.

- EdgeRouter UI is horrid and it’s much easier to manage over SSH.

- Cloud Controller is easy to setup, but doesn’t work with all product lines.

tl;dr The hardware is really good, but software is lacking, especially because not all hardware is UniFi compatible.

View on HN

My response was tongue in cheek but seriously I recommend budgeting a VM or Raspberry PI to run their controller software which offers the most configuration options.

https://www.ubnt.com/download/unifi/

A Raspberry Pi probably won't do. The controller requires MongoDB which itself is no longer supports the 32 bit architecture which most RPis are running on.

Pi 3 is 64 bit and natively supported in Fedora.

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Architectures/ARM/Raspberry_P...

I tried putting it into a docker container, but in the end didn't want to deal with the complexity -- bought a key. Does the VM/Raspberry PI get you anything the key doesn't?

The Unifi cloud stick isn't that much more expensive than a PI, and is probably the least amount of work to set up a dedicated controller.

I use an Atom based PC stick that I had lying around to run the controller (on Windows) and it works great.

I mistakenly thought the cloud key ran a lesser version of unifi than the distribution found on their website, however googling around implies it's the same version. So I suppose budget for a cloud key or a pi. A raspberry Pi 3 is 64 bit, runs Fedora natively and can serve up other functions beyond the key. So I lean towards the Pi but if they're functionally equivalent I suppose it's down to personal preference.

You mean these UniFi APs don't run a built-in web server to allow configuring them?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com