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.
Cameras? Maybe it’s a UK thing, but the only ones I can ever find on eBay are yellowed G3s for silly money.
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.
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.”
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
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”.
I’d say it’s best to only buy routing devices supporting openwrt. Some Ubiquity devices seem compatible, so maybe you are in luck. In my opinion it’s just best to stay away from preinstalled commercial software and just install Linux. You get away from the whole process of enshitification, gain long term support and an incredible set of features commercial software will never provide (at a reasonable price) imho.
