I've never been a fan of Ubiquiti's proprietary solutions, but this might actually be one product that I can be enthusiastic about.
After a long time they introduced ONVIF into their camera products which basically opened it to everyone.
The Cloud Gateway will be sold or given away. It's utter crap. I'm now building an OpenWRT container on IncusOS as my Internet gateway/router.
The switch is meh. It's easy to admin, which is nice - though I'm having to run UnifiOS on another container on said IncusOS.
The APs are fine. Decent power and the central administration with the switch is actually quite nice.
If I knew everything I know now, I wouldn't have bought any of those but they will do for now.
What needs do you have for a router that the Cloud Gateway is missing or is bad at? A PiHole equivalent is about all I can think I'm missing.
There were a few other niggles, and in the end I just found it easier to do what I need on OpenWRT.
This includes physical NICs on Linux, but the PPPoE interface has to tunnel through one of such physical NICs.
If the physical NIC has an MTU of 1500 (and can't be changed), the PPPoE NIC must do MSS clamping, effectively reducing the MTU from my network to the Internet to 1492. This increases fragmentation and overhead.
If I can increase the physical NIC's MTU to 1508 (and the ISP supports it, which mine does), then the PPPoE tunnel can use the full 1500 when talking to the Internet.
So, it's technically not _required_ but it's an improvement I should be able to implement easily (in OpenWRT I literally type 1508 on the MTU box for the NIC, or issue a single uci command).
Check my answer to the sibling comment [0]. It's also known as mini jumbo frames, and is documented in RFC4638 [1]. And here's a post [2] talking about using it on OpenReach FTTC, which is similar to my own infrastructure, only I'm FTTP.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48589677
[1] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc4638
[2] https://blah.cloud/networks/enabling-mini-jumbo-frames-rfc46...
You can also modify your frame size: Unifi Devices - Gateway - Settings - MSS Clamping.
In my view , unifi gives you all the power and very good defaults at a very reasonable price. Their nearest competitors (eero on consumer side and ruckus / Aruba on business side) have less features and more price.
> 1492 is the default frame size set by unifi on wan pppoe. You neither need to know such esoteric details nor need to set them. “It just works”
It doesn't just work. It kept it as 1500 and I started having all sorts of issues. MSS clamping effectively reduces it to 1492 but that's not what I want. Something so simple as setting an interface's MTU shouldn't be a big deal, this is a dumb design choice.
> unifi gives you all the power
Yes but hides it out into creating a boot-time systemd unit to ensure it persists.
> Their nearest competitors (eero on consumer side and ruckus / Aruba on business side) have less features and more price.
Clearly you haven't read the rest of the thread. I'm comparing Unifi with OpenWRT, opnSense, vyos, etc.
I would never rely on the likes of Eero, and I don't want to shell out for enterprise gear which in fact don't tend to be great to operate either.
> You can also modify your frame size: Unifi Devices - Gateway - Settings - MSS Clamping.
This reduces my MTU inside the tunnel and even though it works, it's not as efficient as using the full 1500 MTU.
For my personal setup, I decided to go with OPNSense and I couldn't be happier. Much more control, at the cost of being a little more hands on.
I think the best (rough) comparison here is MacOS vs Linux (or more accurately in this case, FreeBSD).
I use it with 8 APs in a mesh and a few switches, all UI, and it just works. I also have a lot of success helping out some local SMBs by setting up UI for them.
Apart from the shitty software and basic features either missing or locked behind a monthly cost, the network itself is not bad at all, I get 600-700mbps on wifi throughout the house and have my servers wired on 2.5gbe
But the one thing I really thought I was buying into by choosing an amazon brand was ease when it came to buying upgrades, and yet I ended up having to buy extra hardware (like the wired gateway) from ebay and sellers in the US as amazon does not sell their own hardware everywhere
I finally bought a Unifi and I'm very happy with it so far, 6 months in. There's a few things I haven't tried, like rebooting it while it doesn't have an internet connection (I'm looking at you, Deco!), but so far my big complaints are that it's opinionated about the initial setup, and setting up a static IP for a device that isn't connected yet is a serious PITA. I had devices on my old system that I didn't want to have to change IPs (because the computers talk to each other) and that was not easy. If I had to do it again, I'd probably just let it do what it wants and deal with changing all those configs to the new IPs.
FWIW, I just have it as a router, and my Wifi is still some of my expensive standalone Asus wifi routers acting as just access points. I didn't see a point in replacing them when they were working great as APs.