Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Replacing My ISP Router with a UniFi Cloud Gateway Max

kevquirk.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 24 posts

Re: Replacing My ISP Router with a UniFi Cloud Gateway Max

#11

Post by stego-tech »

aksss wrote: post #10
stego-tech wrote: post #7

I sympathize with the poster, as deploying my own stack should've been an easier migration from their EdgeRouter kit than it turned out to be - though wisely, I had budgeted a six hour window for a process that ultimately took ~2hrs. Ubiquiti's niche really is the "I want Enterprise features but I also don't want to be my own CCIE to run this shit," and in that sense it overachieves nicely. Does it have idiosyncrasie…

Interesting, for my part I would never build a data center (or underpin critical infrastructure) with Ubiquiti but I have a lot of it at blind remote sites and it works well enough - WAN failover, and they've built out a fair bit of downstream failover as well - shadow gateways, RPS, etc. Has replaced a lot of Meraki subscriptions.

Ooh, I'd love to hear how you've made that work because ZTD with Ubiquiti - at least in their Bluetooth app deployment era - has been a crapshoot for me.

As for data centers, I should be clear on sizing: we're talking the same sort of footprints you'd see Meraki leveraged for (Could I build a data center on Ubiquiti? Totally. Would I? That's highly dependent on the specific context.

Re: Replacing My ISP Router with a UniFi Cloud Gateway Max

#12

Post by deepsun »

aetherspawn wrote: post #8

I think the mistake the OP made was going to unifi.com for the setup, when in fact you can go to 192.168.1.1 and set it up fully locally from there. The cloud management is great after setup, but not during setup because yeah you keep losing connection to it whenever you break the internet or whatever. This is greatly alleviated with their fancy 5G router they just released, which allows you to remote manage even if…

When I go to 192.168.1.1 it still asks for my login/password/2FA I created on unifi.com. Well, theoretically it's possible router can securely check those locally without WAN, by copying password+2FA init token + salt hashes locally, but I highly doubt it's the case.

Re: Replacing My ISP Router with a UniFi Cloud Gateway Max

#13

Post by deepsun »

IMO, networking is just hard, especially debugging -- how to observe some part when a path there is blocked by who knows what -- firewalls, incorrect routing, hardware port isolation etc.

And honestly I think ubiquity makes it easier, not harder. At the expense of complete understanding what it does. It's just the networking itself is hard.

Re: Replacing My ISP Router with a UniFi Cloud Gateway Max

#14

Post by comrade1234 »

I control three UniFi access points from ubiquiti software running on my Ubuntu server. They're powered over Ethernet from a switch and so unobtrusive - the only cord is the Ethernet cord. The management software is quite nice and I can access it from my phone or over http - no cloud necessary.

My router is an edgerouter-4 with a fiber port which is also from ubiquiti but for some reason it's not controlled by the ubiquiti controller. It has a web interface that's powerful but a bit of a mess in the sense it's managing an advanced router and there's just so much you can do you can't possibly have a nice interface for everything.

This has all been running 10+ years with very very little maintenance. It just keeps going.

Re: Replacing My ISP Router with a UniFi Cloud Gateway Max

#15

Post by aetherspawn »

deepsun wrote: post #12
aetherspawn wrote: post #8

I think the mistake the OP made was going to unifi.com for the setup, when in fact you can go to 192.168.1.1 and set it up fully locally from there. The cloud management is great after setup, but not during setup because yeah you keep losing connection to it whenever you break the internet or whatever. This is greatly alleviated with their fancy 5G router they just released, which allows you to remote manage even if…

When I go to 192.168.1.1 it still asks for my login/password/2FA I created on unifi.com. Well, theoretically it's possible router can securely check those locally without WAN, by copying password+2FA init token + salt hashes locally, but I highly doubt it's the case.

Actually that’s exactly what it does (seems), because it works fine without internet.

I say this authoritatively because I have a ‘huge’ small business deployment of like 20 UniFi devices, and the internet breaks virtually every time I change the complex routing setup. If it were not for this, my setup would be unmanageable.

I have to flip flop between unifi.com (for when I break the wifi routing) and local (for when I break the internet), but boy is having both options handy!

Re: Replacing My ISP Router with a UniFi Cloud Gateway Max

#16

Post by eszed »

efitz wrote: post #3

I set up a Unifi system in Thailand that has to be downstream (DHCP) from an ISP provided router. Both Unifi and ISP device want 192.168.1.x and want to be the DHCP server and there’s no easy way to tell Unifi that “WAN” is 1 hop away. I agree with the poster that if you are doing anything that is not a defined happy path for Unifi, it is a freaking nightmare and will likely involve rebuilding, resetting and readopti…

I've hit this, too, and the trick is to connect to the Unifi gateway offline, before you adopt, and change its LAN address space away from the default, and then connect it to the ISP router. I'm sure you figured that out, but I'm leaving this here in case someone else finds themselves in this bind.

Re: Replacing My ISP Router with a UniFi Cloud Gateway Max

#17

Post by eszed »

It's been a while since I had to do it, but there used to be a way to transfer an AP or a switch (I've done both) from one gateway device to another. Have they removed that, or did the Cloud Key never offer it? I wouldn't have expected them to "fail over" from one controller to another, because as far as Unifi are concerned those are two completely separate stacks, even if they are identically configured.

Re: Replacing My ISP Router with a UniFi Cloud Gateway Max

#20

Post by cassianoleal »

seemaze wrote: post #4

Couple items: - You don't need a cloud key, or any other hardware to use the Unifi APs. You can SSH in or configure with an app on your phone. But you miss out on a lot of the features that make this hardware desirable. I ran a Unifi system for a long time with no controller or cloud key at all. - I've never needed an internet connection to set up a Unifi system, in fact I typically get the local network setup and wo…

Some devices absolutely need an Internet connection to set up.

I purchased a Fibre Cloud Gateway (which is being given away), and there is exactly nothing you can do with it before you connect it to the Internet. It doesn't even let you begin setting it up.

Post reply on HN