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Unifi Travel Router

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Re: Unifi Travel Router

#331

Post by matwood »

QuiEgo wrote: post #309
jasonkester wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 the…

TS makes it super easy to use a VPC I have in the US as my VPN exit while I live in other parts of the world. Apps that work on phones, computers, and my AppleTV are big pluses over Wireguard which I have also used.

Re: Unifi Travel Router

#332

Post by klinquist »

afavour wrote: post #298
QuiEgo wrote: 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.

I have a dedicated travel AppleTV for this. AppleTV is great at hotel captive portals (forwarding the web page to your phone). I am already logged into all my streaming apps, including my home DVR (ChannelsDVR).

Re: Unifi Travel Router

#333

Post by ryandrake »

rainsford wrote: post #281
bogwog wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So basically wireguard, but you have to pay for it, and you have create an account through Google/Apple/Microsoft/whatever. Wireguard is not that hard to set up manually. If you've added SSH keys to your Github account, it's pretty much the same thing. Find a youtube video or something, and you're good. You might not even need to install a wireguard server yourself, as some routers have that built in (like my Ubiquit…

It's not really "basically wireguard" and you don't have to pay for it for personal use. Wireguard is indeed pretty easy to set up, but basic Wireguard doesn't get you the two most significant features of Tailscale, mesh connections and access controls. Tailscale does use Wireguard, but it establishes connections between each of your devices, in many cases these will be direct connections even if the devices in quest…

I guess I'm still not following. Is there an example thing that you can do with Tailscale that you can't do with Wireguard? "Establishes connections between each of your devices" is pretty vague. The Internet can already do that.

Re: Unifi Travel Router

#336

Post by mbesto »

bnc319 wrote: post #48

So… hear me out. Could I connect this to an airline’s paid in-flight WiFi network, and then broadcast an open network to effectively open up access to all other passengers for free? If enough WiFi pirates do this on flights perhaps it would kill paid WiFi entirely (just need enough Good Samaritans) (And yes I know there are other bypasses you can do like spoofing MAC addresses to get around some device count restrict…

I basically do this so my gf and I can connect all of our phones and computers.

Re: Unifi Travel Router

#337

Post by QuiEgo »

ryandrake wrote: post #330
QuiEgo wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 the…

I was still completely mystified until your last sentence. And now I'm just mostly mystified. I, too, keep hearing Tailscale Tailscale Tailscale from HN commenters but have no idea why I'd need it. For anything I need to access on (or from) my home network I just use a VPN I've hosted in my home for the last decade or so.

If you've already got a VPN solution your happy with, Tailscale probably adds very little value for you. It's just basically the easiest / most user friendly way to setup a VPN to your home network.

It can do way more than just being a VPN-to-home, but that's how most users use the free part.

Re: Unifi Travel Router

#338

Post by jms703 »

malfist wrote: post #290
master_crab wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do want to point out that dumping all of your traffic through a home/office network is not always a good idea. YMMV, but if you are in, say, LA, and pushed your 0.0.0.0 traffic through your home in NY, you just added quite a bit of latency. This is great for keeping things in a LAN, but make sure you use your network rules correctly and don’t dump everything to your home network unless you need to. (I too have a gl…

I disagree. DNS is generally unencrypted and leaking that over whatever open wifi you're on is generally worse from a privacy perspective than the latency you add bouncing through your home where you probably have encrypted DNS setup. Even if you don't visit any http sites, you never know what might phone home over http, so an OS level VPN provides foolproof privacy at the cost of a tiny bit of latency.

Using encrypted DNS doesn't necessitate routing all your traffic through your home network. You can still encrypt all your traffic by using an encrypted DNS service or, if you really want to, a VPN service. But moving everything through your home network is not necessary, especially if you have any kind of usage caps.

Re: Unifi Travel Router

#339

Post by jibe »

mi_lk wrote: post #166
esperent wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most newer (or at least new + expensive) phones can share their wifi connection via hotspot. 2.4gh only though I think.

Do you know what’s the technical term to search if a phone has that capability? Asking for an iPhone

Unfortunately, iPhone can't bridge wifi networks, which makes travel routers particularly useful if you have an iphone, and a laptop, and are staying at a hotel with wifi.

Re: Unifi Travel Router

#340

Post by devilbunny »

dangus wrote: post #24
slig wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a hard time believing anyone would actually use this versus self-hosting headscale in a discarded ThinkCentre and running it from a closet.

I run OpnSense, Wireguard, hooked up to third party WiFi access points, and I had to do a lot of configuration and work that I wouldn't have had to do if I had just bought Ubiquiti equipment. I did save money, a really significant amount of money. Obviously, yes, I am capable of going through the work that eliminates my need for this product. I have no trouble configuring Wireguard and setting it up on my client devi…

The catch is figuring out what's going to stick around and what won't.

I have a Ubiquiti EdgeRouter Lite that's a little over ten years old. At the time, it was revolutionary in its ability to pump a whole lot of data over a cheap device with a lot of features - but a lot of those features weren't available in the GUI at all; you had to go CLI and learn Vyatta (of which it was a fork) to do them. It's been updated over the years and is now much easier to use as the web interface exposes a lot more functionality, but it's not part of Unifi (and never will be).

Early on, I looked at and even tried one of their AP's. 100 Mbps wired uplinks for N wireless? No thanks. Even the one that I got to test with had absolutely abysmal range. Say what you will about TP-LINK generally, but their Omada unified control system had AP's that actually worked in my house. So the early Unifi stuff wasn't anything special, and based on how they had dropped the ball on so much of their early hardware (the EdgeRouter Lite had its software on an internal USB drive that, out of warranty, failed in a way that I was only able to diagnose with a serial console cable - at least it had a port so I could monitor it during boot, and searching for the error messages found a way to replace the thumbdrive and reload the software) I had no reason to go with them.

If I were setting someone up today, with all new gear, I might go Unifi, but I have no reason to spend any time at all replacing a system that works just fine.

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