Nice to see they are getting this out and patched. Can folks familiar with UniFi, say how reliable (and easy) upgrades are on the Ubiquiti gear? I'm considering getting some of their hardware.
- One switch update enabled some sort of loop detection which broke the Google Wireless meshing with Ethernet backhaul, and their support people, after several attempts, proclaimed was not something that could be disabled. Fixed it by putting in a dumb Netgear switch that only connected the Google mesh nodes, but disappointing to find on a $400 "Prosumer" switch.
- One set of camera updates left 4 of my 5 cameras unbootable and support was unable to provide a solution for. This was after their warranty period, so I have them sitting around because I can't quite bring myself to throw them away.
I replaced the switch with a used Aruba PoE switch ($90), the cameras with a Montavue (VAR for HIKVision cameras), and BlueIris setup. It pained me because the Unifi Protect mobile app really was best in breed, but not too much because I frequently had issues with the cameras reliably booting, and would have to go through rebooting cameras for a few days after updates or a power loss.
I'd recommend Ruckus R610 used gear for wireless, though for the last ~6 months the prices on them have doubled -- I got one 9 months ago for $150 landed, and now they all seem to be more like $300+. Fantastic APs though.
Sharing this most recent one cos HN loves cited sources but there's a ton of independent issues
https://www.forbes.com/sites/leemathews/2021/09/22/widely-us...
And both HikVision and Daihua have a large array of brand names that they sell under:
See: https://ipvm.com/reports/hik-oems-dir and https://ipvm.com/reports/dahua-oem
From stories, it seems if you use stable release track, it’s reliable enough to leave on auto-updates. Some folks do the same for the release candidates, some even for betas. But the more you’ve custom configured, the less likely that’s going to go perfectly every time.
Reasonably easy to restore after a bad update though.
That said, depending on your use case, for “reliable (and easy) upgrades” consider Eero Pro kit with 3 bases of 3 radios each.
For devices like these, I would never allow auto-update. I update when I have the time to sort out any failures and I know I don't need access to the internet.
All hosted on debian.
I've had just one update go bad, so I do do the recommended backup/export beforehand.
That said, I don't trust Ubiquity much anymore. Use Unifi in QA setups so we are prone to hit cornercases, but they exists.
I still buy their gear as there is no competitors in the price range.
Edit: Spelling
My big problem with Ubnt is things like trying to force me to create and use a cloud account just to use my local hardware. I did not, but a couple different times they tried to make it mandatory.
To me it's not good enough that I was able to get around that. To me it's a problem that they even tried, that they would if they could. That means my win is only temporary and every day they are trying to figure out a way to get what they want, and every day might be the day they essentially break my stuff.
But I've had a pretty good experience with the hardware and software all in all. I run a cloud key, the old original one. It was annoying paying so much for so little, and annoying needing anything at all just for that, and annoying that it makes my 24 port switch effectively a 23 port (I see it as robbing a port because it's not like any other device which does some job I want. The devices all run full freaking linux OSs. They have way more than enough brains on board to hold their own config settings!), but I can't say it ever failed.
But I only use switches and aps. No cams and definitely no router. That's another case where it's only been fine for me because I'm not doing what they want.
There have been a few different times over the last few years where I was glad I never even made an account on their cloud service let alone actually configured a device, and glad my router is opnsense.
So there are things I don't like, but failed updates and non-function has not been among them.
Running upgrades is certainly easy, always has been a feature of it. But "reliable" isn't a word I'd use for them any longer, internally the company is an absolute dumpster fire with toxic and unaccountable leadership. Upgrade tracks themselves are a total mess now, and whether a given firmware upgrade goes well or introduces new edge cases is a crapshoot. There is essentially zero useful bug/feature tracking system, all nuked along with the great old forums in favor of their current garbage. For the controller itself it's textbook bikeshedding, they keep redoing the UI and making it worse without adding basic features asked for (and in the old days even confirmed as accepted!) years and years ago. Also, a lot of their hardware is ancient now despite selling for the same price (I suppose inflation represents a stealth price cut to some extent).
All that said, if you're only interested in WiFi and Switching it still mostly works albeit whether their current engineering can keep up with the sudden shifts is an open question. And the basic stuff is pretty cheap, reasonably performant overall, and has nice physical design. If you don't use them for routing/firewall/services (where they are utter garbage) but run that via something like OPNsense or VyOS or whatever you like instead, then a lot of the downsides go away or become manageable. Having devices be on a management VLAN and isolated controller is trivial and goes some ways towards helping any security flaws as well.
I'd still hesitate to recommend them for greenfield projects though. But unfortunately there also isn't anything else I can point to and just say "yep that's the drop-in replacement", industry is depressing right now with all the either total isolated individual web management on the one extreme or cloud-subscription-tie-in on the other. UniFi's strengths and model doesn't have an obvious successor. I remember some news that Cisco seemed to be aiming right at them, but haven't been able to locate it again? There are a few other self-hosted options apparently but I at least haven't been able to quite figure out their licensing and limitations yet.
Edit: I'll also add in fairness that even if an upgrade is junk, I've never not been able to recover. Recovery has absolutely been a bit hair-raising on occasion, particularly when the controller once hit its 4GB log limit IIRC and silently corrupted itself then backups for months, but even there I still managed to manually get into mongo and get controller config back out. Just keep an eye on your backup system there. And even super dead devices I've so far over the years always managed to get back with at worst TFTP. In that regard it's been pretty solid though again routing aside.