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Comment by syntaxing | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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

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?

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.

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.

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

I switched from Unifi to Aruba

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.

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.

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