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Ubiquiti SFP Wizard

blog.ui.com

71–80 of 196 posts

Re: Ubiquiti SFP Wizard

#71

This is not for me as I'm not a professional network engineer, but I do want to say that Ubiquiti has made home networking SO fun for me. Everything truly "Just Works." My setup is definitely more on the prosumer side, but it's been so build out and inspect my network with their tools.

Can someone explain what "just works" when compared to other networking gear? IE I use ASUS and their mesh, and it all "just works". Have a mix of routers over 10 years and they all mesh together.

I started with TPLink gear in a mesh mode, and it kinda sorta maybe worked? I had an access point on the ground floor, a range extender + option to connect RJ45 (for devices with out WiFi), on the middle floor, and an additional meshed AP / range extender on the top floor. The top floor meshed thing basically didn't work, the RJ45 thing got me like 50 Mbps while wireless was getting me 200 Mbps. It 'just worked', but it didn't work well.

In that same house switching over to Ubiquiti just worked, and worked well. I had the same setup (mesh nodes on every floor), but performance was substantially better (2-4x).

I've moved house, and now have wired APs on every floor, and get phenomenal performance. The management UI to see what is where / how its connected, and when something doesn't work is very good. It also enables things that were hard / difficult with other non-'prosumer' gear. Like I can have multiple WAN ports, and plug in a cellular modem, so that when my internet doesn't just work (which happens way too often) it auto-fails over to the cellular modem, and continues just working.

The reason I went with Ubiquiti in the first place was their Unifi Protect line of cameras, and again those 'just work' from the wireless small ones to domes / etc plugged into wired connections they all just seamlessly connect to my dream machine, and provides a great UI, and the data is on prem which I want.

The only thing Ubiquiti doesn't do the way I want is DHCP + DNS, so I have a seperate raspberry pi doing that.

After years of fussing around with either linux / pfsense / ... routing + firewall solutions, and different AP / meshing configurations the ubiquiti stuff is very hands off.

Re: Ubiquiti SFP Wizard

#72
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ubiquiti doesn't invent anything; they make it cheap with a better UI.

Better UI is stretching it a bit... Maybe for the amateur/enthusiast (homelab) market... I certainly don't need or want their rack augmented reality... 'feature'? fad? And their clunky web UI is both limiting and slowing me down. Thanks, I'm perfectly fine with a console and simple LEDs.

> I certainly don't need or want their rack augmented reality... 'feature'? fad?

I find it mind-boggling that you can hardly buy _RAM_ anymore without programmable RGB LEDs, but that managed switches do not come with a per-port RGB LED to let me mark VLANs or cables that need replacements or whatever. Come on! A nice little square all around the port, please. Instead, we get the QR code plus an app that needs to talk with the cloud.

Re: Ubiquiti SFP Wizard

#73

FiberStore (fs.com) have offered vendor neutral and reprogrammable SFPs and other modules for years (they're also dramatically less expensive).

> (they're also dramatically less expensive) It depends, but for typical networking I'd say Ubiquti is actually offering better pricing here (outside of 10G LR) - and I'm saying that as someone who has sold 10s of thousands of FS modules to customers. | FS | Ubiquiti -----------+------+----------- Programmer | $369 | $49 10G SR | $25 | $12 ($20) 10G LR | $34 | $59 ($85) 25G SR | $49 | $29 ($49) 25G LR | $74 | $69 ($1…

> Ubiquti is actually offering better pricing here (outside of 10G LR)

Ubiquiti's 10GB LR of $59 is for a 2-pack, not per-module. So that still comes out cheaper than FS for the sale duration at least. Not by a lot, granted, but still cheaper.

Re: Ubiquiti SFP Wizard

#74
post #59
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funnily enough, this 10gtek worked on one of my 3 switches, but I could only establish a gigabit connection. I returned it [1] These 10gtek fiber modules on the other hand have worked flawlessly so far. [2] This Mikrotik module would not establish a 10 gb link with my Thunderbolt dock no matter what I tried. Works fine with my servers though so I swapped it out. I've pretty much resigned myself to just buying the ful…

did you try to disable autonegotiation and force speed ? i think i had to do it a couple of times with copper

Yep. I actually had to do that to get the Ubiqiti one to work. It just did not work when I tried that with the Mikrotik adapter.

Re: Ubiquiti SFP Wizard

#75

FiberStore (fs.com) have offered vendor neutral and reprogrammable SFPs and other modules for years (they're also dramatically less expensive).

They're dramatically less expensive than original OEM, but UB clearly is targeting them with this release/aggressive pricing. It remains to be seen if UB's pricing (particularly $50 on the "Wizard") is just temp to get their foot in the door. I suspect it is; and we'll see the price increase later.

> I suspect it is; and we'll see the price increase later.

I used to use Ubiquiti gear a number of years ago, but left when they started moving into an Apple-esque "prosumer" direction with corresponding price increases. That, and the constant bugs.

Re: Ubiquiti SFP Wizard

#76
Does it only clone the EEPROM from one SFP module to another (so you need to physically posess both), or can you write arbitrary data?

And does it only write to SFP modules from Ubiquiti (looking at you FS BOX)?

Another tool you can use for this (without a nice UI) is the SFP Buddy: https://oopselectronics.com/product/SFPB

Re: Ubiquiti SFP Wizard

#77

This is not for me as I'm not a professional network engineer, but I do want to say that Ubiquiti has made home networking SO fun for me. Everything truly "Just Works." My setup is definitely more on the prosumer side, but it's been so build out and inspect my network with their tools.

Do you think it'd be worth upgrading over TP Link Omada hardware?

Based on having migrated multiple clients from UniFi to Omada but still has UniFi deployed across a few sites too, I'll give you a different take from the replies you've gotten so far. TP-Link's Omada is a newer, direct competitor to UniFi, and when it came out Ubiquiti was an absolute fucking dumpster fire in terms of, well, everything. Their software, hardware, and even the forums (which they killed in favor of the current mess). Their gateway/routing/network service story sucked, they were missing key features, their firmware was rotting in basic ways (like ssh being so old it literally included only insecure ciphers and you couldn't even connect to it anymore without + options), and finally were also starting to make more and more concerning and ugly choices that pointed towards serious organization issues (constant UI bike shedding churn in favor of ancient features and bugs they'd agreed were important) and enshitification (tying software applications to required hardware). However, they were also the only player doing that sort of fully self-hostable unified configuration networking. I migrated all the gateway/routing/simple service stuff to OPNsense, but then was stuck.

TP-Link stepped in and have been working hard on Omada being a direct competitor. It's clearly inspired liberally from UniFi but that's A-OK by me, it's healthy for both to be going head to head. In my experience it had somewhat fewer features, particularly initially, and they definitely don't cover the full breadth of cool and useful niches that Ubiquiti does either. But what there is has worked well and been more reliable for me, particularly in a mixed environment. For example Omada worked perfected day 1 with automatic L3 controller discovery using a simple DHCP Option 138 set on my OPNsense unit pointing right at my controller FQDN. It was easy and built-in to supply a proper certificate for the Web GUI. I never got either of those to work with the UniFi controller. The switching has been rock solid reliable and the WiFi more performant, better coverage, and features like PPSK were added way before Ubiquiti did and have a much better interface.

However, Ubiquiti does seem to perhaps be turning things around a bit. Their router hardware is no longer garbage, even if it is of course far less then you can do yourself. From what I can see in simple ongoing tests they do a better job on the software side for router features now as well, so if you're all-in on both systems for the total single-pane experience UniFi might once again be better. Their announcement of the "UniFi OS Server" 3 months ago (in Early Access) and publicly last month was both a surprise and heartening. Rarely does one see companies that start down the path of lock-in reverse course at all. If they make it possible to run all their various controller applications on your own hardware I'd definitely start to add more back into my mix.

So if you've got decently modern Omada hardware (and you probably do because not like it's been around that long, in terms of networks anyway) I'd be in no massive rush to switch to UniFi unless you see some key specific things you'd like. If you think you ever might want to roll your own other infra same thing even harder. But if you're thinking about a bunch of upgrades anyway then worth keeping an eye on and looking carefully at the various feature mixes each have.

And that's a really statement that makes me super happy to say, because I think each is now driving the other, which is really healthy for this ecosystem!

Re: Ubiquiti SFP Wizard

#78

some context that's perhaps not obvious to non-networking people: essentially all networking hardware above 1G doesn't have rj45 or fibre ports in it, it has holes that you put modules in, "SFP+" modules for 10G, "SFP28" for 28gig networking, etc. most manufacturers of devices - the things with the holes, NICs, switches, routers - make their devices only officially work with modules that claim to be manufactured by t…

The FS-Box lets you pick from a list of manufacturers and serial numbers. Does this only do cloning from another physically inserted SFP?

Re: Ubiquiti SFP Wizard

#79
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think it'd be worth upgrading over TP Link Omada hardware?

All the complaints about Ubiquiti in this thread from a few months ago dissuaded me from investing in their gear: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44746603 I ended up going with TP-Link Omada and have been happy so far (a managed switch and wifi 6 WAPs). I am a bit concerned about their security track record given how bad their soho products are, so I ended up sticking with my opnsense router at the perimeter as…

>I am a bit concerned about their security track record given how bad their soho products are, so I ended up sticking with my opnsense router at the perimeter as the first line of defense.

Ubiquiti has had plenty of bad security issues as well I'm afraid, but fundamentally one of the advantages of both is that with a self-hostable controller and VLAN isolation you should be able to minimize your attack area pretty well from both the LAN and WAN. No remote dependencies at all. But like you I run OPNsense at the edge, you do at least have to trust their firewall and such if you want to go full single-pane.

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