If you are curious whether Ubiquiti ditched the fan on the new U7 Pro Max, well, I have some bad news for you. I opened the device and this is the teardown video.
Are Ubiquiti devices still the best value for homelabs and small businesses these days?
For home, second hand Ubiquity might be. You can get flying saucers taken off from corpo upgrades for dirt cheap.
That’s where literally all my stuff comes from. Cameras, switches, APs, so much unifi in this house and I barely paid for any.
No. TP-Link Omada is usually better and cheaper these days and offers nearly identical features.
And TP Link can be used standalone,the controller is just a gimmick.
For pure networking (not WiFi) Mikrotik is also a reasonable alternative,but requires more knowledge.
I bought several before knowing what I was getting into. They work well but are designed by people worshiping Apple. Everything is locked into their ecosystem. You can’t even ssl into the access point to configure it. You need to run their Java controller app to configure them or worse buy another product (cloud key) just to configure the access points you purchased. Then they try really hard to get you to setup your network admin password on their cloud servers ( they have already had security breaches where the passwords leaked).
For a small businesses that pay someone off-site to manage their network they seem fantastic. But they are the opposite of homelab ethos.
But again, they work really well. The access points do channel strength negotiation automatically every night by talking to each other.
I was able to SSH into mine and I’m running their Docker container with a Unifi Controller instead of a cloud key.
You don’t even need the controller to set them up anymore. You can run them as standalone APs by configuring with the app.
You miss out on a lot of features that way, but they work fine.
Oh for sure. I ran them without a controller for years. I only set it up to do a wireless bridge.
Docker
Yes, the Java app dockerized.
If you were actually able to set it up via ssh, then you should be able to point me to the documentation for the Ubiquity AP cli.
I’m not sure if you are a fanboi or a shill but it is dishonest to claim that you say you could configure your Ubiquity AP when Ubiquity itself refuses to provide documentation of the cli interface.
Another poster said the same thing and linked to the same thread I found years ago which says in effect, “There is no official cli documentation for the APs. You might be able to sneak a few commands by digging through the forums.”
If you were actually able to set it up via ssh,
I never said that. Have a nice day!
I’m on Ubiquity’s payroll.
I can ssh into the APs, although I’m not sure about configuring them independent of a controller as I haven’t tried. I use a free google cloud tier to host the controller, which can be managed via web gui and phone app. It may use some Java elements in the controller but it wasn’t hard to set up.
You can configure them independently of a controller by ssh but the config will be lost on a reboot or when the device next polls the controller
Edit: and apparently someone else has said you can use the app to configure them without a controller at all
Requiring a phone app, java app or Cloud Key to configure an AP isn’t home lab ethos. That it looses config on reboot if you configure it by ssh is weird given you don’t need a controller running once they are setup. They can be rebooted without a controller and still work fine.
Where did you find the command line documentation? I was never able to find anything.
It’s not really documented anywhere officially. I’ve found the knowledge over the years from searching the ubnt forums. But I stopped using unifi equipment a few years ago for similar reasons.
This forum thread is probably the best starting point I can give you but configuring unifi APs via ssh for any reason other than maybe a botched IP configuration is a bad idea
Good luck if you don’t have a dream machine and you aren’t using 192.168.0.0/16. If the APs don’t find a dream machine they won’t get an IP from DHCP for some godforsaken reason and revert to 192.168.1.20 and won’t do anything until you configure them with ssh. Except you have to ssh on a lan that doesn’t exist which is a huge pita. This is why I have omada APs now.
I’m not sure about configuring them independent of a controller as I haven’t tried.
That’s my point. With regular ap’s you can do everything via ssh. Ubiquity doesn’t seem to document the command line. The website doesn’t list any commands. It only says “only do it with a Ubquity engineer helping you”.
Don’t know why you were downvoted. Everything you said is true.