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Unifi Travel Router

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Re: Unifi Travel Router

#301
post #288

When I travel, I like carrying as little as possible. These comments are fascinating to me, people are brining more devices than I have in my whole house and needing to make a LAN for them. Personally I just connect my phone to WiFi and then use Tailscale and call it a day.

Some people spend 100+ days a year in hotels.

As a someone who has traveled for work more days in the year than not, I'd much rather not require yet another device to carry and deploy in an ever changing network environment.

The multi-uplink is intriguing. While on the surface it seems that an ostensibly 'plug and play' carrier aggregation dongle (no idea if this is actually a feature) would be a easy solution to smooth out poor connections, many networking hiccups encountered during travel just boil down to impossibly terrible RF environments, regardless of the spectrum or protocol.

Re: Unifi Travel Router

#302
I built my Unifi system around my Tailscale network, so I get basically the same benefits for free. I guess you either put in the admin effort up front, or pay the appliance tax on the back. What am I missing?

Re: Unifi Travel Router

#303
post #288

When I travel, I like carrying as little as possible. These comments are fascinating to me, people are brining more devices than I have in my whole house and needing to make a LAN for them. Personally I just connect my phone to WiFi and then use Tailscale and call it a day.

Plenty of us travel with family! I also think the variable state of hotel TVs is a factor even when travelling alone. Being able to plug your own device into the HDMI is valuable.

Fair enough, I get the TV for kids thing.

For me, I can't remember the last time I used a hotel TV. When I travel, I want to do stuff at the place I'm visiting, the hotel room is just a place to sleep and shower.

If I do want to watch something, I much prefer the experience of my much nicer TV and surround sound system at home. That said, I don't watch much TV, so maybe this is easier for me.

If I have downtime when I travel, I tend to just read, or do the same thing I do at home - doomscrolling news, reddit, HN :)

Re: Unifi Travel Router

#304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same! And the best thing is that you can install Tailscale, so you can connect to your tailnet, and exit all traffic through one of your nodes (e.g., your home/office network). It's incredibly useful, with the added bonus that you don't need to install tailscale client in any of your travel devices (phone, tablet, work computer, etc).

> with the added bonus that you don't need to install tailscale client in any of your travel devices (phone, tablet, work computer, etc). I am sorry, this confuses me. If I don't have a lclient, for example in my laptop, how does my laptop uses Tailscale then? Also, TailScale Personal says 3 users. Is that a problem for as we are 4? (me, wife, son, doughter).

For what it's worth, you get 100 devices total, regardless of number of user accounts. If you don't need the permissions granularity that individual accounts have, consider only having an "admin" and "untrusted" account... or a single account, and pinky promise your family not to play with it.

Re: Unifi Travel Router

#305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Tailscale is installed on your router, then any client will also be able to connect to Tailscale networks. Fo example, if you have a default route back to your home network on the router, any client will also connect through that tunnel back through your home. This assumes you are using your travel router to connect your laptop as opposed to say the hotel wifi. (In this scenario, your travel router is connected to…

Oh, got it. What about the users? Do I need 4 for my family of 4? Or are the 3 users included in the free plan just admin users?

You only need separate users if you want to restrict certain features (devices, apps, etc.) to only certain users (i.e., it's more of a business thing). My wife's machines all use my username because... she lives with me; if she wanted suddenly to learn networking and computers and hack all our stuff, she could do it anyway since she has physical access.

So pretty much anyone you would trust on your LAN can be trusted with your Tailscale user. You can just log yourself into Tailscale on the kids' devices and then use the admin console to make those devices' logins never expire. They can use all the features, but they don't know your authentication method and thus can't get admin access themselves. About the only situation in which the typical home user would need multiple accounts would be if someone was physically away from you and had a new device they needed to connect to your tailnet (their term for your collection of devices, services, etc.) but you didn't want to share your password with them. If they're physically near you, you just authenticate their device and hand it back to them.

Re: Unifi Travel Router

#306
post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some people spend 100+ days a year in hotels.

I did 82 days last year. Everyone travels different, but for me I feel like any time I spend watching TV in the hotel is wasted time - I'm in a whole other city, surely there's something I can do? The hotel is just somewhere to take a shower and sleep. I don't watch much TV in general though so I guess it's easier for me.

If I'm traveling for work, I'm working all day. At the end of the day I often just want to rest in the hotel room, especially if I take my dinner in a restaurant.

Typically I don't watch the hotel TV though, as I don't want to figure out what channels are on it and I probably wouldn't want to watch them anyway. If I watch anything it will be on my iPad.

Re: Unifi Travel Router

#307
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tailscale running in subnet router mode on a GL.iNet router comes close. You can setup Tailscale through the GL.iNet GUI but to have it also route traffic for everything over to your Tailnet you need to flip one setting via an ssh command. Not as convenient as this travel router sounds though, but comes close-ish for techies. (wish it didn't require that tweak via SSH. Maybe it'll be added)

Something something dropbox is simple :) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 I wish Eero offered this feature. I bring three eeros to Airbnb’s to replace their crappy WiFi with my same SID, but it would be nice if it connected back through the home internet.

hah, 2nd time in the last couple months I've been compared to that LEGENDARY Dropbox comment...

In my defense, I'd argue that the average Tailscale user would be comfortable running an SSH command! And GL.iNet is just one very minor tweak away to making this entirely possible from the GUI. (though they might be intentionally avoiding it because of the support burden of quirks caused by Tailscale acting as a subnet router...)

Re: Unifi Travel Router

#308
post #288

When I travel, I like carrying as little as possible. These comments are fascinating to me, people are brining more devices than I have in my whole house and needing to make a LAN for them. Personally I just connect my phone to WiFi and then use Tailscale and call it a day.

[deleted]

Re: Unifi Travel Router

#309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same! And the best thing is that you can install Tailscale, so you can connect to your tailnet, and exit all traffic through one of your nodes (e.g., your home/office network). It's incredibly useful, with the added bonus that you don't need to install tailscale client in any of your travel devices (phone, tablet, work computer, etc).

I’m seeing a lot of this same comment here, so I went to check out this tailscale thing, which clearly I must need. Can anybody explain what Tailscale is, does, or why everybody seems to have it? Looking at their website, it’s just a huge wall of business jargon. Really! Read it. It’s nothing but a list of enterprise terminology. There’s a “how it works “ page full of more (different) jargon, acronyms and buzzwords,…

It's a wrapper around Wireguard that lets you use common SSO providers (Apple ID, Google, etc) to manage access.

It also handles looking up the IP address of your "nodes" through their servers, so you don't need to host a domain/dns to find the WAN IP of your home network when you're external to it (this is assuming you don't pay for a fixed IP).

Most people put an instance of it on a home server or NAS, and then they can use the very well designed and easy to use iOS/mac/etc client to access their home network when away.

You can route all traffic through it, so basically your device operates as if you're on your home network.

You can accomplish all of this stuff (setting up a VPN to your home network, DNS lookup to your home network) without Tailscale, but it makes it so much easier.

Re: Unifi Travel Router

#310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same! And the best thing is that you can install Tailscale, so you can connect to your tailnet, and exit all traffic through one of your nodes (e.g., your home/office network). It's incredibly useful, with the added bonus that you don't need to install tailscale client in any of your travel devices (phone, tablet, work computer, etc).

I’m seeing a lot of this same comment here, so I went to check out this tailscale thing, which clearly I must need. Can anybody explain what Tailscale is, does, or why everybody seems to have it? Looking at their website, it’s just a huge wall of business jargon. Really! Read it. It’s nothing but a list of enterprise terminology. There’s a “how it works “ page full of more (different) jargon, acronyms and buzzwords,…

Not sure if anybody gives you the answer to "what is tailscale?". So, this is my answer (hopefully it's correct and simple enough to understand).

Tailscale allows devices that can access the Internet (no matter how they access the Internet) to see each other.

To do that, you create a tailscale network for yourself, then connect your devices to that network, then your devices can see each other. Other devices that are connecting to the Internet but not to our tailscale network won't see your devices.

AI might explain it better :-) Don't know why I wanted to explain it.

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