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Comment by posguy | Hacker News Reader

I want to fire Ubiquiti, but where can I go to get my router, wireless access points and switches in one management interface? There are plenty of poorly performing consumer grade options out there which hide all complexity, but they break in fun ways (eg: Google WiFi creating loops in the network when users try to do wired backhaul) and only tackle part of the stack.

I really just want to manage an OpenWRT based network with one central web interface and not have to deal with corporate/state entities deciding to push fun changes out in the management interfaces that power these systems.

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I keep seeing the requests for central management interface, which leave me somewhat puzzled. Why do you need in a home environment? I run a small network with one big router and several access points, and at least with Mikrotik's gear, it's pretty much fire and forget. It has CAPsMAN[1] to centrally manage wireless networks, but I've found it to introduce unneeded complexity. Auto-updates[2] don't need any central management either. Monitoring can be done through SNMP[3], and there's a REST API too[4].

[1] https://wiki.mikrotik.com/wiki/Manual:CAPsMAN

[2] https://wiki.mikrotik.com/wiki/Manual:Upgrading_RouterOS#Rou...

[3] https://wiki.mikrotik.com/wiki/Manual:SNMP

[4] https://help.mikrotik.com/docs/display/ROS/REST+API

I have a good deal of experience with Mikrotik's offerings, and I am not looking to power networks I support with a patchwork of different systems that each have their own interface.

Most of the value proposition of the Unifi lineup is I can look at a single website that I host and see the WiFi clients connected to an access point, what switch feeds that access point internet (and whether its linked at gigabit or 100Mbps), uptime on all devices involved in the stack, whether the client has poor WiFi quality, trouble DHCPing, etc.

The single pane of glass to view everything when I am many miles from the networks I support is essential. Compared to when these sites were on PFSense before migrating, these networks have improved uptime, rapid remediation of issues, and changing VLANs, SSIDs and labeling each client on the network is a snap.

Edit: Borrowed /u/bpye's single pane of glass term

> Most of the value proposition of the Unifi lineup is I can look at a single website ...

> The single pane of glass to view everything when I am many miles from the networks I support is essential

It's also why we're talking about this.

Only because they made it cloud based.

If they never forced people to create a cloud account - and instead allowed people to choose - this would be wildly different.

Did I miss something here? I run a Unifi network with a local account and don‘t recall being forced to create a cloud account.

The UDM, UDM Pro, and I think _all_ newer controller software require cloud login at some point in the process.

It's definitely not all the new controllers, although with the UDM line you might be right. I think there's a huge intersection between people who would buy those specific devices and people who are perfectly happy to have remote access to their control plane in the cloud.

The UDM and UDM-Pro force you to set up a UI.com account, and cannot be used with external Unifi controllers like one you might run on a server, PC or cloud key (Ubiquiti's management software on a Power over Ethernet powered dongle, does not require a UI.com account).

The UDM and UDM Pro are the controller, and you can disable all of the cloud nonsense after initial setup.

You can disable on the UDM but I don't believe the UDM pro allows you to. Thats just what I've heard though, so might not be accurate.

The UDM Pro does allow it. I've got one, and all of the cloud stuff is disabled.

Wow, that sucks. So you HAVE to create a cloud account to be able to disable it later?

It is also about dark patterns. I never had the cloud option enabled. One night after a long day I upgraded the controller software. I noticed a message like “do you want to login?” and wasn’t awake enough to realise that it asked for my ui.com account and that after that cloud management was enabled and my phone switched to authenticate from a direct connection with the local credentials to using the ui.com credentials.

It looks like what I was referring to is that they recently made the initial controller setup on the cloudkey require a cloud account [1], but you can migrate to local only after the initial setup.

So the only remaining 'local only' from start to finish is for self-hosted I guess.

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNkXAe0aOAg

I have a cloud key gen2 plus and do not have a UI.com account. I would classify getting the network controller setup without having one initially "mildly annoying but worth it".

I'm also floored at the number of people who are spinning the existence of a self-hosted controller as somehow a bad thing...?

They do - first thing I did though was then go in and add a local account, and disable remote access (I have a wireguard tunnel that terminates on a server behind my firewall if I need remote access).

It seems the hackers currently in your network must value those same features. Very convenient.

I don't use a UI.com account to connect to the Unifi controller I host (as I don't need their inconsistently working NAT traversal to get to my controller), hopefully the networks I support are safe due to not being entangled with Ubiquiti's cloud infrastructure.

Anyone who is forced to get a UI.com account (eg: UniFi Dream Machine and UDM-Pro owners) should change their credentials and do a factory reset on their routers and Access Points ASAP.

> do a factory reset on their routers and Access Points ASAP

This is a miserable user experience. If you do a reset and don’t know the SSH password on APs or cameras you get to spend a hellish few hours crawling though ceiling insulation, climbing ladders and physically resetting devices. It’s so shit. I’ve just done it, but not due to security concerns, but instead because of a UDM-P crapping out randomly.

This is why I like having the controller in a virtual machine offsite. Factory resetting the router and pairing it to the same site in the separate controller gets me back to the same exact place I expect to be.

With the UDM series, the integrated controller ensures you lose everything if you have to factory reset, site to site VPNs have to be manually configured, and numerous other minor annoyances crop up (like UI.com not always being able to connect to the controller).

>If you do a reset and don’t know the SSH password on APs or cameras

Who's fault is that if you don't have it? First thing I do when I set a new site up is record all the vital information like that for when I will inevitably need to recover stuff.

It should be standard backup/disaster recovery practices - for ANY system. Making sure you have critical information BEFORE you really need it is preparedness 101.

Mikrotik itself had security problems before. Tom Lawrence covered a lot of this on YouTube. I can recommend his channel on the topic.

> I keep seeing the requests for central management interface, which leave me somewhat puzzled. Why do you need in a home environment?

Crap wifi was a huge thing I dealt with. Unifi fixed that completely. The ability to run a relatively complex network (by home network standards) with multi access points is nice, but the ability to administer them without CLI interface is great. I loved my edge router but touched it with trepidation. It was rock solid except when I was sucking with it. Unifi suits/suited the enthusiastic amateur.

> I run a small network with one big router and several access points, and at least with Mikrotik's gear, it's pretty much fire and forget.

Unifi used to be too, with an interface that was a bit difficult to navigate (settings spread among about 20 tabs, but it was possible to get the job done without sshing to components).

Now it’s flakey. I just rebuilt my last week which was working fine but I couldn’t log in and the UDM-P screen said it required resetting. Dark times.

> Why do you need in a home environment?

To answer this for me personally (and I suspect this is a pretty common answer): To use the best, and to explore technologies that I might suggest to business clients.

Business clients love central management interfaces.

As well, I’m honestly kind of done with managing fiddly “snowflake” devices, and central management interfaces usually come with the ability to standardize the config across devices.

Frankly I wonder at how big some of these peoples' houses are. My single seven year old Nighthawk router covers an entire 2300 square foot home and penetrates the brick walls to reach halfway up the street.

I feel the same way - my Nighthawk is going strong with custom firmware, but my friends with Ubiquiti gear try to get me to replace it with a bunch of Unifi stuff every time I talk to them.

What firmware?

I need new APs soon.

https://www.myopenrouter.com/blog/asuswrt-merlin-xwrtcross-w...

Thank you!

Depends a lot on the house. My house is <2000 sqft, but signal, especially 5Ghz propagates poorly though old school plaster walls.

It wasn’t a problem until covid when multiple meeting or other streams just performed poorly on a marginal network. The Ubiquiti gear made it easier to run antennas for optimal signal.

The hot thing to do is to shit on them, but I’ll be sticking with it. They’ll emerge better from this crisis and if you think that any competitor in this price point is better, you’re delusional.

Also, foil-backed insulation [0]. I finally figured out they insulated the hell out of my house with this stuff.

Works amazingly on heating and cooling bills, but it's a pretty solid wall to radio waves.

[0] https://www.ibhs.co.uk/foil-backed-mineral-wool-50mm-thick-x...

COVID had me setting up more UniFi APs. It held up incredibly well for moving large files across VPNs and running multiple Zooms for work places and school.

COVID must have been a massive boost to their bottom line.

I’m no market analyst, but the last year, even including the last week, has been very good to Ubiquiti.

https://www.nasdaq.com/market-activity/stocks/ui/advanced-ch...

My house had a problem since the cable came in on one corner of my house, and my office was on the other side. Browsing was ok but things like video calls suffered, at least until I went with a Unifi BeaconHD.

Mine's only slightly larger than that (mostly by virtue of having 3.5 levels, not by X-Y size), but the original plaster walls attenuate the hell out of 5GHz signals. I have two APs, one in the basement and one on the second floor and even with that, I'm considering adding two more inside and a dedicated one outside to serve the patio/BBQ area as I can readily tell the speed difference to internal file and backup servers if I'm in the same room as an AP vs on another floor or outside.

Make no mistake, it still "works" with just one, only slower.

> the original plaster walls

Ah, the ones that have wire mesh underneath? That would do it.

Somehow I have managed to spend most my time in a house that has concrete and brick stopping 5G, a house with wooden walls that block RF and foil insulation under the floor which is even worse, and a workplace environment that has literal faraday cages all around.

I like UniFi in wall access points in the room I’m inside.

No. My house predates the widespread use of expanded metal mesh style of lath. Just the old wood strip lath and thick, horsehair plaster.

That’s not my experience, all the way from Meraki enterprise access points to the standard consumer WRT54GL.

First problem is 5GHz is terrible at going through walls, I don’t believe it will even go through a single brick wall and maintain decent bandwidth. Even 2.4GHz is considerably slowed by 2 or 3 drywall/plywood obstructions.

Second problem is can the mobile device you’re using return that signal through all those walls to the access point. I have noticed an huge increase in quality and snappiness of FaceTime and other high up and down bandwidth activities once I added more access points so that connections are going through only 2 or 3 walls.

For another reference, I have a hotel that needed to upgrade its network to meet the brand standards for signal strength in all the rooms, and we had to end up installing 6 access points in the drop ceiling of each hallway 15 guest rooms in length (each guest room is ~15ft wide, so the corridor was ~225ft long). It resulted in the elimination of almost all guest complaints about the wireless network.

My house is about that size. My detached garage is 400sqft. My barn is 1600 sqft. And my travel trailer is 37" long. My network comes into the house and the wireless needs to cover all of the structures because we need into in all the places. It's all spread over about an acre and a half. I run ethernet to a PoE AP in the garage, through an overhead crawl space that covers thale span between the house and the garage, I have b2b radios between the house and barn and the trailer has an LTE router/wifi repeater that picks up wireless from the barn.

Not super complex but no single nighthawk is gonna do it and the unifi management interface does the job. I'm not cloudy though.

Probably not big by US standards, but WiFi attenuation across multiple floors is such that an AP in the living room won't provide any decent signal one floor straight up. Depends on the materials and layout of your house...

This also means you can re-use a frequency with just one floor in between and no issues, and with a horizontally directional antenna, possibly even on adjacent floors.

Getting signal to devices isn’t a problem, but it’s not easy having an AP receive signal from a low power device. Multiple APs is the way to go in my experience.

I run two AP's hard wired to the PoE switch in my closet. These AP's being in the hallways on opposite sides of my home. I run them at lower power so I don't have an excessive amount of RF blasting into neighbor's homes, but I still get good signal quality to/from each AP. Because I now have two AP's running on different channels I've effectively doubled my network throughput overall.

One important thing to think about when planning your WiFi deployment is if you have things that have poor connectivity, everything on that channel suffers. I can have several devices running at several hundred megabits of quality, but a single device being really slow bogs down the channel and suddenly everything else starts getting lots of jitter and overall poor network performance despite most devices having good signal quality. Also, your device may show it has good signal strength but it might be poor quality (bad SNR) so in reality its a poor link speed. Having things physically closer usually results in better average SNR, meaning higher speeds for everything on the channel.

Also, as others have mentioned 5GHz might make it through a wall without a lot of stuff in it, but its not going to penetrate very well through several walls. Having my AP's in the hallways means there's usually only one wall with minimal stuff in it between a device and the AP, so each device usually reports at least several hundred megabits of throughput possible.

I use three unifi AP-Pros for my 3500 sq ft home plus front and back yard.

I possibly could have done it with two if I ignored the outside areas but one definitely wasn’t enough even with careful placement.

Edit: obviously 2.4ghz penetrates further, but 4k streaming on multiple TVs doesn’t go well with the bandwidth (and interference) on 2,4

> Why do you need in a home environment?

I definitely don't "need" it. But it's veeeeeeeery convenient. Especially when it comes to security, being able to see which devices have updates and perform them all from one screen, is extremely convenient. I'm highly interested in paying for convenience at home.

Thankfully I don't use their cloud based management interface -- as far as I know this breach does not affect my local UniFi Controller. Hopefully this is a rude awakening and Ubiquiti goes back to their old consumer focused approach.

Similar to the other responses, it's the fact that I can manage my network remotely from a simple app or UI. This helps me answer phone calls from my family asking why Netflix doesn't work on TV #2, when I'm not at home. Won't solve all problems, but at least I can narrow it down and troubleshoot.

And I like the fact that I can an overview of the state of my network; one of my wired links to an AP would degrade to 100 Mbps at times, and being able to see the link speeds easily was very helpful (it was a bad ethernet cable in the end).

Before I moved to Ubiquiti I had a spate of problems with my fiber broadband, which would stop working for a few minutes at random, resetting my RDP connections. I had a vendor-supplied Linksys (I think?) router, and trying to troubleshoot it was painful. If I ever have such problems again I'll have much better diagnostics.

That said, I won't buy any Ubiquiti gear that requires the cloud, and my faith in the company is eroding. But, like others, I would be at a loss what to replace my gear with at the moment. I just hope it'll function well enough until either Ubiquiti gets it act together (again?) or a viable competitor arises.

> it was a bad ethernet cable in the end

Checking the cable is like checking if the power is on, it is NEVER the cable - except in networking for some reason. Half the time it's the cable.

Network cables (copper and fibre) have a limited bend radius. Most people don't think about this and will bend a cable beyond tolerance, which will eventually result in the cable not working correctly, and/or manifest as intermittent issues.

I suspect that's the most common cause of network cables 'going bad' in the home.

I learned this back in school, when the previous years students had laid new Ethernet cables from the classroom to the server room, but the machines would only get 10M and not 100M link as they should.

Didn't take us long to notice they had laid the cable like electricians, neatly following the contours of a few door frames with tight 90 degree bends.

Glad I learned that lesson early.