RIP to my 8-port Unifi switch after years and years of Texas outdoor temps | Hacker News Reader

RIP to my 8-port Unifi switch after years and years of Texas outdoor temps

arstechnica.com

41 pointsstriking58 comments

It’s such a shame what Ubiquiti has become these past 3-5 years. Their product used to be fun and reliable. Nowadays, just feels like corporate greed and just another Cisco. I eventually switched out all my Ubiquiti stuff due to it.

Out of curiosity, what brand(s) did you switch to?

I switched from Unifi to Aruba

So what's the go to brand for decent networking gear nowadays?

It's not for everybody, but I run OpenBSD on an APU2 from PCEngines. The hardware is EOL but it's handy to be able to run my setup on virtual any modern commodity hardware, as long as I can fit a couple NICs inside.

A couple years ago my parent's DSL line was accidentally severed, but our neighbors agreed to let us bridge through their WiFi. I setup an old Pentium MMX 200MHz box with a PCI NIC and PCI wireless card and got them online again. It was more of a fun exercise and an effort to put something between our network and theirs, but it was even fast enough for Netflix.

any murmurs if PC Engines are thinking about a replacement platform yet? Maybe something like the N100/N300 series? I see quite a few firewall appliances with those.

Or maybe the space is too saturated these days with competitors from aliexpress/etc.

The sense I’ve got from what they’ve published, and a few emails back and forth on final orders, is that the guy behind PC Engines has had enough and wants to go do something else with their life.

Mikrotik is decent! While there is some lackluster hardware (and, to be honest, most of their wireless AP solutions kinda suck), I've ran Mikrotik on two small-scale networks (~60 devices each, not including WiFi) + my home network, and had no issues whatsoever. Love them

I find the management software to be... lacking. That's where ubiquti does great, in my opinion. I have some Mikrotik wireless wires and they're great but I never look forward to having to touch them (which is extremely rare).

Aruba Instant On. Same hardware as their enterprise offerings, much lower prices, zero hassle.

VyOS on a passive Intel box for routing.

Can you say more about this? I have a bunch of Ubiquiti gear for years and have been really happy with it.

Why do you say that Ubiquiti has gone the corporate greed route? I haven't been following this.

Seems like they're still dramatically cheaper than Cisco, etc. But they've definitely had a few product flops that didn't make much sense to me.

Can't stand Ubiquiti myself. The web interface breaks every convention and I remember constantly running into bizarre problems like not being able to change port forwarding assignments without the devices being online or download benchmarks being exactly half as fast as they should be.

I only recently got into Ubiquiti gear, besides availability issues in their store, I have nothing to complain about, but I'm not a hardcore user. What issues do you have with them?

I also found it was just overkill for my home network. And it was a hassle when my controller computer would die and I'd need to sort everything out. Went with a simpler solution with web and ssh interfaces.

They've had their rocky moments, to be sure - and I won't hesitate to ding them for making self-hosting obscure. But, you can do so, and they actually listened and walked back their egregious stuff, so I'll give them credit for that as well, and my APs and ERPoE-5 have been rock solid. I've also liked their latest controller software (I run a VM on a ZFS storage backend, so I can roll it back if an update goes sour).

If anyone from Ubiquiti is listening, the fact that I can self-host is a major reason for my keeping my existing gear and being willing to buy more. I'm not keen on trusting my network administration to third-party server access.

I want to _strongly_ second this. After seeing some Ubiquiti gear in use in various enterprise settings almost a decade ago I personally investigated the brand for home use and bought into some of the WiFi gear for use in conjunction with the rest of my network hardware/software.

If there were ever a requirement to allow public internet ingress or egress from this stuff directly I would immediately replace it. Self-hosting the controller is a base requirement for my use-cases as well.

My stuff just keeps on working. So for me I have no complaints. They aren't perfect but I haven't found anything out there that makes me want to switch to something else.

I think that some of their more recent decisions have been questionable (Unifi Video -> Protect) - but there is still no doubt in my mind that you get a lot for your money, even if you do have to troubleshoot a little bit more than more pro (Cisco et al) stuff...

I'm not sure I love some of the more home automation based stuff as I've not used it - but at least with the Unifi Protect range and the switches / APs I've mostly been happy.

Seems like some of the more vocal people in the Unifi community are angry as they have built businesses around supporting these sort of setups - where I totally understand that a broken firmware update can wreck havoc.

Just don’t see this. I’ve bought a random piece of equipment from them each year over the past 6ish years. Never any issues.

I have an outdoor shaded box with a USW Flex in it. That one box kills them quickly. I doubt it gets over 110-120F, so the root cause is a bit of a mystery. Any suggestions for a more robust model?

The box has a long PoE run and then it redistributes out the PoE to 3-4 other PoE devices. The wattage is well within spec, but they usually drop to 100MBit from 1GBit a few months before permanently failing, so there could be some sort of signal integrity problem or over-driving of the phy, etc.

I'm kind of considering trying a Flex Mini, since at least they're cheaper. (The box is waterproof.)

Maybe I'm wrong, so confirm by opening your previously-killed equipment and looking for corrosion, but:

> The box is waterproof

to me just means any water (or humidity) that's in the box when you seal it, stays in the box. Maybe add a dessicant that you can replace every few months?

Used to do this with a tin can full of potassium permanganate (potassium manganate 7 in newspeak). Just heat it till it’s white then put it back after it’s turned purple from absorbing water (I.e. recycle it)

Not even sure if you can buy it now, it’s useful for nefarious things. Used to be in survival kits, it’s a fire starter, disinfectant and mouthwash too.

I can't really get into my parents attic rn to grab a photo, but very similar install.

I've had a Netgear* switch running up there non-stop since roughly 2000! Have never had to reboot it. Granted, power outages have rebooted it, and I have no way of actually checking its up-time.

*Those were the days when Netgear products were solid

That's pretty cool. Is it a managed switch? I feel unmanaged switches have an advantage for being relatively simple with no user facing config or startup/backup images. They're basically just an ASIC with supporting hardware to look up numbers in a table and transmit out the resulting port - it could last decades.

Exactly - it's unmanaged. So more like an actual "appliance".

> All it took to wire up my garage were some cheap gigabit SFP transceivers (pretty sure I used these ones right here), 40 meters of aqua-clad multimode fiber, and a $75 appointment with a contractor to actually run the fiber.

I'm puzzled as to why someone writing for ArsTechnica would need the contractor to run the fiber. Any idea?

They already said they didn't want to pay to run a conduit and I can't imagine a contractor doing anything at all that involves both a shovel and a fiber run for $75, even 8 years ago.

The contractor probably only terminated the fiber. The tools to do fiber termination and splicing are much more expensive than $75

Alright, maybe. I assumed a pre-terminated, off-the-shelf cable, but you could be right.

Even now the fiber installers around here don't terminate, they just run a (potentially very long) already terminated cable and then shove it into the ground (blade into the dirt, press a bit, shove cable in).

I got a fiber Internet connection installed recently, the contractor ran a 300 foot long cable from across the street. When he finally had it all routed, tested it was good, then somehow he broke the end of the fiber when connecting to the ONT. The solution was not to splice on a new end but to instead remove and re-run the entire 300 foot cable with a new unbroken one.

I'm very glad I wasn't doing this myself.

The contractor I was talking to as he ran my line (around here, they run it through the pipes that were laid down months earlier and leave it on top of the yard for someone else to bury later) said the company didn't trust contractors to do the termination, and so just sent them out with various lengths of cable.

> I'm puzzled as to why someone writing for ArsTechnica would need the contractor to run the fiber. Any idea?

Because sometimes you do not want to dig thru insulation and just pay someone for it.

I wonder if putting the switch behind a UPS or more substantial surge protector/line filtering would help it last even longer. The batteries in a UPS at those temps might give up before the switch does.

I am hearing a several people saying "they are moving away from Ubiquiti" but none say exactly what they are moving to or in past tense what they moved to.

What are you all moving to?

We moved everything from ubiquity to Rakus and Netgear.

My ubiquity switch died right after the warranty expired and same thing with the cloud key. Not only that, every single update crashed my cloud key and had to reset it

Another another location HP Aruba instant on.

Meanwhile, I've had two USW-Lite-16-POE's fail just outside their two year warranty period, alongside a CloudKey and other equipment from them. It's just junk and they don't stand behind it. I'm transitioning away from them as best I can. The only thing I have left is my gateway and some APs.

The hard drive on my Cloudkey Gen2 Plus failed less than a year after I bought it. I don’t blame Ubiquiti for a hard drive failure. I blame them for designing the device to be fanless but constantly hot to the touch (44 degrees as I’m writing this, with two 120mm fans right next to it). Countless support posts complaining about poor hard drive lifespan in that kind of environment, but never a response from Ubiquiti or a redesign.

I put a heatsink and fan on the outside of mine. Didn't trust the "passive" cooling

If you still want to use SOHO equipment, I like Aruba instant-on a lot. Their APs are just as good as Ubiquiti's and you don't need a separate doodad to control them, the first one you set up can control the others.

Still got my USW-8-150 laying literally my feet. Dirt and dust everywhere, I accidentally kick it all the time. I should feel bad for having my network equipment heaped in a pile under my desk but hasn’t bothered it one bit. I was always nervous about it because it runs really warm but really it’s been fine.

This is why I use Mikrotik. I swear they’re the last brand standing that is actually built tough. Affordable too.

Mikrotik is indeed awesome

Do you remember the time when Ars Technica didn't only publish reposts from the Verge, Logitech press-releases, and covid articles but actually posted hands-on technical and sysadmin tutorials (like the original of this switch from many years ago), and did hands-on reviews instead of generating it with a template?

Pepperidge farm remembers (but only very vaguely, it was a long time ago).

Your comment made me nostalgic so I went to John Siracusa's last macOS review from 2014 (10.10 Yosemite)[1]. Copied and pasted into Microsoft Word, it is 84 pages long, almost 27,000 words, and averages about one image per page. Quality and length are obviously not the same thing, but I can't imagine any online news outlet publishing something like that now.

1: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/10/os-x-10-10/

Such quality work takes time and effort. Ultimately I think Siracusa gave up just because how much time it was taking away from other work. And Ars articles remain free to read.

Here is their macOS 14 review[1] published one month ago. I don't know how many pages it is in Word, but on their website it's 21 pages long.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/09/macos-14-sonoma-the-...

Im pretty sure Siracusa’s review was not standard fare for Ars or really any publication whether formal or not.

His reviews were an exception and the fact that they don’t host his reviews anymore doesn’t say anything about how Ars has changed (especially because Siracusa himself doesn’t do the reviews probably because the new OS’s aren’t interesting enough).

But those reviews were awesome. Since I never upgraded my OSX until x.1 at least but usually only after x.2, the real reason I enjoyed OSX release day was because it meant a great evening spent reading John’s review.

I could be crazy, but isn't the linked article exactly that? They also did a long series about how Ars itself is hosted[1] just a couple months ago.

[1] Part 1 of 4 here https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/07/ars-o...

I remember, I was quite surprised to see that on the front page. But I stopped reading it back then, because the first paragraph had something along the lines of "we love to run our own infra, so when the opportunity came to switch to cloud, we couldn't be more excited". I stared at the screen for about 2 minutes, and then closed the tab.

And yes, the linked article is exactly that, you are not crazy. One small thing: it's from 7 years ago.

> One small thing: it's from 7 years ago.

What article are you talking about? The one linked from this discussion thread is from last Friday. The one I linked in my comment is from 3 months ago.

Oh, sorry then. In this case I take back the `you are not crazy` part :D

The main linked article is most definitely not a hands-on nor technical article, at least by my definition (which may or may not worth crap). Just an eulogy for a dead switch, because the writer ran out of topics, and the Verge writers were sleeping. I was referring to the article that was linked inside the Ars article, a detailed hands on article about home networking, something which I was missing since Ars found out about Covid, and let the tech writers go.

Ah fair enough :) I guess to me the linked article ("RIP to my...") is not a "repost from the Verge, Logitech press-release, [or] covid article" and is a "hands-on technical [article]", if a little on the fluffy side. So I thought you might've enjoyed the article. But, I guess not.

I am also not a fan of Ars's health writer, but I enjoy most of the rest of their content.