Ubiquiti have almost no goodwill left. They have abandoned a few lines of ( well-liked) products, have introduced replacements which are inferior, buggy and try to entice you to pay for their cloud "solution" ( which as we've seen, is a dumpster fire). Then there were product upgrade ads in the UI. Then there's the generic lack of QA. And the fact they have multiple competing lines of products most of which are abandoned and the rumours are that it's basically shipping the org chart where the abandoned parts are due to teams leaving.

On the homelab subreddit, they're no longer the go-to recommendation they were a few years ago.

What is the go-to these days?

I’ve swapped out all of my ubiquiti gear for Mikrotik. Granted, it is not as turn-key and fancy, but it gets the job done a lot better and especially cheaper.

Thanks for the recommendation. I’ve been a long time user of Unifi kit but the utter stagnation of the entire product line has really made me want to start looking for other options.

For instance, I keep hoping for an updated USG3 given the current one hasn’t changed since 2014 and can’t do IPS without throttling speeds to 80Mbps which is simply unacceptable these days, but all they seem to be doing is focusing on big and expensive 1U hardware which I just don’t have room for.

I really like aruba instant-on if you want something that is flexible but has enough handholdy features to get you through the usual tasks.

Isn’t Aruba pricing in a different category than Microtik or Ubiquity?

Aruba's Instant On line has AP's that are similarly-priced to Ubiquity's, although they don't have an offering like the UDM Pro.

Very much so!

There's a really interesting statement about mindsets here.

Everyone I know in tech would probably agree with you, and consider suing reporters to be a bad approach. But everyone I speak to in business management seems to take the view that this strengthens their view of Ubiquiti.

>But everyone I speak to in business management seems to take the view that this strengthens their view of Ubiquiti.

Ubiquiti basically needs to weigh whether it makes sense to get burned by Streisand effect now or cut their losses and hope journalists don't burn them again in the future when they don't do due diligence on a lead. After reading through the complaint, it looks like their demands are reasonable.

What I'm more interested to know is whether never issuing a correction/retraction is going to work for or against Krebs.

How would due diligence on a lead help here? Beyond establishing that 'Adam' was a company insider, I don't see how any due diligence could have picked up this set of facts.

Yes, because people in business management are known for their great objectivity, integrity and critical thinking prowess.

Indeed, and in this recent paper, it is argued that quite literally the opposite is causally true: https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w29874/w298...

"Within five years of the appointment of a business manager, wages decline by 6% and the labor share by 5 percentage points in the US, and by 3% and 3 percentage points in Denmark. Firms appointing business managers are not on differential trends and do not enjoy higher output, investment, or employment growth thereafter."

This is downvoted, but imo, kinda yes. The culture of business management is exactly as parent implies.

I'm not who you are talking to, but the bar to having a successful outcome for this type of suit is very high. Anyone who is familiar with litigation and the bad PR that comes with this type of suit would run from this as quickly as possible. Remember, ediscovery goes both ways in a suit like this.

I'm halfway through outfitting my parents place with ubiquiti gear (following a successful half year of using in my own home). Now I need to decide whether to ditch what we've already bought, keep using half the gear, and use other companies for the other half, or eat the cost, and get rid of it.

Not a cool move from them.

A lot of ubiquiti wifi gear can run OpenWRT. Would at least insulate you from their cloud insecurity.

I went to mikrotik and never been happier. Do it.

Although I wish Mikrotik sold directly from their web site. Did you buy from Baltic?

That said, I am really excited about their forthcoming pre-paired PTP Gigabit link kit. I have been using ancient Ubiquiti paired links and need a replacement.

Can you recommend any models? I'm after as much speed as possible and ideally POE. It’s for a home setting. Their range is slightly daunting and I can't see anything that looks like what I want.

if you decide to get rid of it, I'm always open for donations!

So basically, at the thought of a company suing a reporter for lying, an allegation that has not been proven or disproven at this point. You're thinking about spending hundreds/thousands of dollars to not use stuff you've already bought from them? Like how does that hurt anyone but you?

I suppose their bigger problem is the complete lack of security around the company, the serious turnover, and yes, suing journalists is never a sign of a nice place.

1. So the families suing Alex Jones, they are in the wrong? Suing a journalists for lying is quite common and normal practice. Thinking poorly of someone for seeking the protection of the court is not a good thing. Just because you like this journalist doesn't change the fact the company is entitled to the protection of the courts if someone legally wrongs them.

2. To be fair, this is the big one. Who does replacing all the hardware ALREADY BOUGHT hurt other than the customer who bought the hardware? You're generally not getting a refund because you no longer like the company. The company has your money. It's not like their products are things you buy on a monthly basis. You aren't hurting the company.

That's an interesting take, because it's not "going after Krebs", it's setting the stage to recover from damages from an employee who manipulated and bullied their way into access and power by taking advantage of the trust of Ubiquiti's current and potential customers in Krebs.

They're not suing to censor a researcher or to create a chilling effect on reporting about security or their company. They have to sue to show the court, their customers, and their investors exactly how Sharp manipulated public opinion to damage the company so he could "save it", how Sharp used Krebs' authority as a security reporter to damage the reputation and trust in their brand to apply that pressure and force leadership to act in the way he wanted, and to be able to claim appropriate damages by rightfully discrediting a false and inaccurate report.

Krebs either has to weaken his own brand and admit he was played or stick to his guns that he faithfully reported. Either way, this lawsuit ensures he's got to correct the report.

Yeah, I've spent hundreds of thousands with Ubiquiti and this has me seriously considering my choices.

Good thing I am in planning phase. I will go see elsewhere.

Can you recommend a good alternative for their APs in a home office environment?

I have really been enjoying the gear that comes from FS (fs.com).

Late last year I kitted out my home with a switch and two wireless access points.

The switch (S3410-10TF-P) does everything that you expect a switch to do. It has a pretty simple web interface, and a pretty comprehensive CLI.

The access points are AP-W6T6817C (6800mbps WiFi 6, 802.11ax). It is rebranded from Ruijie Networks. The access points have a simple web UI for configuring everything, the range is pretty awesome. Multiple radios can be configured with separate SSIDs that have access to different VLANs.

The usability is less than Ubiquiti, but it seems that they work a little better than my old UniFi setup that this replaced (though, that was purchased more than 8 years ago).

There's WPA3 support.

Getting data via SNMP into Prometheus means that you can see per-client usage history, too.

Edit:

Access Point AP-W6T6817C: https://www.fs.com/products/108707.html

Switch S3410-10TF-P: https://www.fs.com/products/115387.html

mikrotik has some pretty good 802.11ac standalone APs, such as this: https://mikrotik.com/product/cap_ac

for home use at this point I would also recommend mikrotik routers over anything ubiquiti edgeOS based, since they seem to have abandoned development on their fork of vyatta... the $50 edgerouter-x (ER-X) as a standalone wired gigabit router was a good choice in 2017 but not so much anymore.

I like Mikrotik gear but IMHO their wireless stack isn't great.

I moved my four HAP AC devices onto OpenWRT; speed and stability has been much improved, and roaming works much better. If you don't need WiFi 6 then I'd go as far as to say this is a great solution.

How hard was it to setup the roaming?

That has been my (one?) major complaint with my Ubiquiti APs - I have four of them scattered around my house/garage and moving between them always suffers a bit of a delay in handing over (or refusing to hand over at all).

I recently migrated a router (not Ubiquiti) over to OpenWRT and have been happy with the stability. I read a bit about roaming, but thought it looked a little daunting.

Actually pretty simple.

Here's an example: https://parkercs.tech/enabling-802-11r-fast-roaming-transiti...

I did lose the central management interface of Mikrotik (CAPsMAN) but for my home set-up this wasn't a big deal. I used the backup and restore capability in OpenWRT's LUCI interface to clone most of the settings.

Roaming / fast transition now works much better. I do still lose a few packets as I wonder around but nowhere near as flakey as on the Mikrotik stack.

I did spend an inordinate amount of time optimising channels, signal strength and placement etc. on the Mikrotik stack before migrating over, and so I kept these settings on OpenWRT. I think a lot of making wifi work well is in this particular black art. All things being equal, though, OpenWRT works better for me.

The ER-X were good until you started to load them a bit too much.

for the majority of use I recommended them for the speed/pps bottleneck was the last mile DOCSIS3 connection (150-350Mbps down x 16 up), wouldn't try to use one with an actual symmetric gigabit link.

Also natively supporting ZeroTier, which is a must for me

every once in a while this question comes up and i find myself browsing around on amazon at single board computers with built-in wifi and four port switches that are for installing openwrt or linux/freebsd yourself on them that run about $300-$400 and wonder "why not?"

are these any good? has anyone had any luck with going full oss for this stuff?

Pc engine APU2 works well with openwrt, but there is no wifi 6 yet. Also they seems to be put of stock.

Yes, they’re great. Protecli is a solid brand with quality NICs (if a bit overpriced). I have several, running a mix of pfSense and Sophos Home for several years. Zero issues. Their Intel Atom units are plenty powerful for a gigabit cable connection.

You can also search AliExpress for “fanless pfsense” and find lots of options for less $$$.

For APs, you could also check out the Cisco Small Business line. Their 240 is the same hardware as some of their enterprise access points, and pretty trivial to set up.

Check out these systems. They seem the natural upgrade when looking for something more powerful than the already excellent pcengines.ch boards.

https://www.ipu-system.de/

If you are in the US, I'm pretty sure I saw very similar devices sold there as well, but didn't keep the link as buying from there would be too expensive.

I love Synology. They have a great mesh offering that can be had cheaply second-hand. Even supports WPA3.

I've been happy with Ruckus. (No affiliation.)

Seconded. EBay is great for picking up off-lease r610s and similar.

TP-Link EAP225 V3

TP-Link devices have been shown to ship with backdoors baked directly into the firmware.

The TL-WDR4300 and TL-WR743ND have a special unauthenticated URL that causes the device to connect back to your IP, download a file, and execute it as root.

The TL-WA701ND and similar models create a hidden SSID that acts as an unauthenticated bridge into your network.

If you can even manage to report security issues to them, they will only patch models you specifically tell them are vulnerable. So as a researcher you have to buy one of every model to actually get things fixed.

Do those get overwritten if you use OpenWRT, or are they at a lower level?

Indeed, running latest OpenWrt release is the fix, yes.

Can you send a link to reports of that issue on their standalone access points? Might just be their routers?

There are thousands of issues. I updated my comment with a few examples.

They suffer from extremely poor code quality, a complete lack of understanding of security, and severe code reuse without recording what devices the code ends up in. You can take existing TP-Link exploits, poke around in a new model of device, and often find the same vulnerable endpoint under a new "hidden" URL.

Edit: to address your specific question, CVE-2021-35004 is RCE against both routers and standalone APs.

You are comparing their consumer routers to their business line-up. The management interface for the business line-up can be properly segregated onto separate VLANs to protect it.

Sadly the consumer department doesn't seem to follow the same model as their business department.

Fully agree. As a shareholder, I feel like I should part with my pile now. This just feels wrong.

Off my shopping list.