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Show HN: Managed UniFi Controller Hosting

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Re: Show HN: Managed UniFi Controller Hosting

#41

Post by xoa »

imstillhere wrote: post #30
xoa wrote: post #17

L3 hosting and UniFi is now unfortunately just one of the many, many areas where it feels like Ubiquiti just kind of quit on it many years ago. It's really unfortunate but I've really gotten that sinking feeling about the platform for the last year or two now, with their killing of the forums and no replacement/upgrade for the bug/feature tracking part being the final straw. But overall they seem to show a lot of the…

They're definitely ignoring a big part of their market that made them successful initially. Do you think there's a potential for disruption in this market?

>Do you think there's a potential for disruption in this market?

Yes absolutely, and UniFi itself provides a template and easy window because the hardware is now so dated. A similar management system but properly extended with solid certificate management and support, nice RADIUS, better L3/L2 (L3 master, L2 hardware fallback), friendly VLAN, gateway device that can actually handle stuff like Pihole, friendly WireGuard backing and usage, and hardware in general that moves forward towards >1G would be very interesting to a lot of people currently on UniFi but beginning to feel the winds of obsolescence blowing. Specific selling point of zero-cloud tie-in (beyond if you yourself want to run it on a cloud service), controller in container or VM standard. Have something (like algo and many others do) to generate mobile profiles, or offer hooks to MDMs or both for ease of deployment.

As far as I know there isn't really anything that does a nice job of putting all this stuff together, despite it arguably being something foundational that more and more people should be doing. Using Let's Encrypt, good automatic cert usage should be trivial. VLANs and VPN are something everyone with IOT should be thinking about. Etc. None of this is radical new technology, just quality implementations and a good GUI bringing together existing stuff, and with zero remote service reqs beyond the optional signing authority (and it should support just running your own root, let the appliance have a USB to make use of HSMs like a Yubikey too). I mean, I'd be delighted if there was no opening here because there is someone else already doing all this like UBNT was working towards too before the current state of affairs, but as far as I know there isn't. Higher end stuff in the market isn't that friendly, you need to be a real expert, the low end integrated stuff is the long standing shit show and/or a bunch of totally standalone components, and "smart" integrated stuff is all cloud sub.

Re: Show HN: Managed UniFi Controller Hosting

#42

Post by joecot »

reillychase wrote: post #40
joecot wrote: post #26

Question, since a number of folks have chimed in about using various cloud hosted controllers: how do you initially setup the network (given that you presumably need the router to have internet access to connect to the cloud controller), and how do you handle it if there's an internet connectivity problem? My office currently has an internal network VM that runs the controller, and we might move to a Cloud Key, but I…

Hi Joe! At https://hostifi.net we have tons of people using the USGs and connecting them to the cloud server. The USG actually is the only UniFi device that has a web gui and it has configuration options for setting up the WAN before you adopt it specifically to solve that problem - how to get internet up so you can adopt to a cloud server. If you have a couple static IPs at one site though, keep in mind that the USG…

> If you have a couple static IPs at one site though, keep in mind that the USG can only do one static IP (without having to dive into CLI)

It is doable though. I have a JSON file of the extra configuration needed to setup the additional WAN IPs and the needed port forwarding. Someone even made a codepen tool to make that configuration[1]. Is that custom configuration not possible with hostifi?

> As others have mentioned, if the controller goes down, the networks do not go down. All of the device settings are stored locally and don't depend on the controller, the only exception being that the hotspot pages do require the controller to be online in order to work.

So while I'm aware the network does not require the controller to be online in order for the devices to work, the problem is that, if there's an internet problem, one of the first places I look to see what the issue is is ... the controller. So with an external controller, if there isn't some extra step I'm missing to deal with internet outages, I'm essentially stuck if I'm trying to figure out what the problem is and change the configuration.

1. https://community.ui.com/questions/Tool-Map-Multiple-WAN-IP-...

Re: Show HN: Managed UniFi Controller Hosting

#43

Post by teilo »

tjoff wrote: post #29
teilo wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are overthinking this. If you have a VM running the controller, or a cloud key, on your internal network, you would need to VPN in to manage them remotely.

No? If you have any remote sites you need it to be directly accessable from the internet anyway. Or am I missing something? Now you might not like that, but realize that this service is exactly that. You might be comforted by the fact that a breach of the controller doesn't affect your internal networks. ...until you realize that having control over the controller means root access on all of your sites. So it shouldn…

I'm not advocating that any enterprise use this service. I run a WAN with 4 local sites (on a MetroE MPLS network) and a remote office via a VPN tunnel. So this is not my first rodeo.

I would never use a cloud-based WiFi controller for the very reasons you specify, and that means that if I need to remotely manage Wifi while I'm out of the office, I'm using a VPN.

A lot of companies don't have the same security concerns. That's all I'm saying. And some for those who, say, manage wifi access intended for the public at multiple sites, like a Hotel or coffeeshop chain for example, this might be just the ticket. They don't have to setup and maintain a bunch of individual controllers, and can centralize everything in one console, and let someone else maintain the server it runs on.

Re: Show HN: Managed UniFi Controller Hosting

#44

Post by reillychase »

joecot wrote: post #42
reillychase wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi Joe! At https://hostifi.net we have tons of people using the USGs and connecting them to the cloud server. The USG actually is the only UniFi device that has a web gui and it has configuration options for setting up the WAN before you adopt it specifically to solve that problem - how to get internet up so you can adopt to a cloud server. If you have a couple static IPs at one site though, keep in mind that the USG…

> If you have a couple static IPs at one site though, keep in mind that the USG can only do one static IP (without having to dive into CLI) It is doable though. I have a JSON file of the extra configuration needed to setup the additional WAN IPs and the needed port forwarding. Someone even made a codepen tool to make that configuration[1]. Is that custom configuration not possible with hostifi? > As others have menti…

> config.gateway.json Yes you can do it in the json file, and that works on https://hostifi.net

> Internet down There's not really anything you would need to change on the controller to fix a WAN issue that you couldn't fix by changing the WAN settings on the USG's web interface... Never had a problem so far with it anyway, with 25,000+ UniFi devices that people have connected to HostiFi. Also, one benefit of a WAN down situation with the cloud controller is you get a notification email about it. On a local controller you won't get a WAN down notification email because... well, it can't send it.

Re: Show HN: Managed UniFi Controller Hosting

#45

Post by kryogen1c »

tbyehl wrote: post #39
throwaway380280 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Something is going to have to give at some point." Former Ubiquiti employee here. The CEO is insanely toxic. Insulting people in the company Slack, publicly firing people on the spot, constantly trying to micromanage everything, shutting down entire offices without warning. It's crazy. So much wasted potential. Most of the good employees left or were fired while i was there. Projects were changed or cancelled monthl…

Robert Pera throwing the mFI team under the bus was super classy. Worst. EOL. EVER. https://community.ui.com/questions/is-MFI-dead/2b4211ee-98c1... UDM and Protect are shining examples of "never rewrite your product from scratch." USG XG was an unmitigated disaster. Dropping controller support for Broadcom-based APs was ridiculous. All seem to be technical debt driven decisions.

Holy. Shit.

If I were to pick the single best indicator of a terrible leader, it would be blaming subordinates for things they are resonspible for. Even if it is 100% the teams fault, the manager is, you know, suppossed to manage them away from such failure.

No organization with such a CEO can survive. We sell unifis at work and I have some in my home, but I will look elsewhere now.

Re: Show HN: Managed UniFi Controller Hosting

#46

Post by tjoff »

teilo wrote: post #43
tjoff wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No? If you have any remote sites you need it to be directly accessable from the internet anyway. Or am I missing something? Now you might not like that, but realize that this service is exactly that. You might be comforted by the fact that a breach of the controller doesn't affect your internal networks. ...until you realize that having control over the controller means root access on all of your sites. So it shouldn…

I'm not advocating that any enterprise use this service. I run a WAN with 4 local sites (on a MetroE MPLS network) and a remote office via a VPN tunnel. So this is not my first rodeo. I would never use a cloud-based WiFi controller for the very reasons you specify, and that means that if I need to remotely manage Wifi while I'm out of the office, I'm using a VPN. A lot of companies don't have the same security concer…

I agree, but the more or less equivalent alternative isn't setting up a bunch of controllers.

It's buying one cloud key, opening one port in the firewall and ensuring you have a dyndns or something to the site with the cloud key.

Re: Show HN: Managed UniFi Controller Hosting

#47

Post by zomg »

CameronBanga wrote: post #15

I've been using Hostifi for a year+ I think now. If anyone is looking for a similar service, I highly recommend: https://hostifi.net Pricing is better IMO if you have any serious number of devices. The founder has created as an open startup ( https://rchase.com ) and has been making good profit, so less concern of it going under too. No offense to OP on that, but switching to something like this can be a bunch of tim…

+1 for hostifi. i've been using them for my home AP's for a couple years now. i sent tech support a couple questions and reilly himself emailed me back. great guy and he was very, very helpful.
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