Looking for feedback: Anyone considering AiCloud important to them?

[ApexRon]

I require my Home Network to be reasonably locked down. NAT and firewall protection has been adequate for many years. I have a NAS on my Home Network but have no reason to access the data when not at home. I have an Apple ecosystem and all my devices use iCloud which I can access when outside the house.

I am from the school of thought that believes a network gateway should devote it's hardware/software resources to provide public network access to devices on a private network with the best possible efficiency while at the same time protecting each network from the other. Keep It Simple Silly (KISS).

Notice that I referred the ASUS routers as network gateways not routers because they don't use a routing protocol.

Bottom line I have no need for AiCloud on my Home Network.

 

[Jaime Alvarez]

I use it, have had it setup for years now, great to get files when I'm on vacation to my iPhone/laptop on the go. I never looked into using another provider. If you get rid of it, please consider providing direction to a free addon "Entware/3rd party script" that is similar. I like the ease of setup and use. I'm not into paying for a VPN or anything like that, not needed to i only want the odd small file.

After reading this and having the BE98_Pro die and RMA'd, I might just switch to the Enterprise Fortress Gateway -> https://ca.store.ui.com/ca/en/category/all-unifi-cloud-gateways/products/efg it's overkill but I need the throughput and great OS

Current setup but with a new BE98_Pro in place of the AX6000 for the throughput -> https://www.dslreports.com/forum/r33819219-Internet-Home-Network-Setups

For external access, setting an OpenVPN server on your router is secure and free. You don't have to pay for a VPN service.

 

[sfx2000]

You don't have to pay for a VPN service.

Getting off topic - nobody should be doing a commercial VPN service for a whole lot of reasons...

 

[Darkje]

Aicloud is not a usable safe function. So integrate something like nextcloud and disabled aicloud. Anyways remove aicloud.

 

[OzarkEdge]

(I know people who don't use it will say "just drop it", but I am more concerned in people who actually DO use it).

I think if a developer believes a feature to be not secure and/or unreliable, they should not publish it, regardless of what anyone else has to say about it.

If there are better ways for the likely user to implement secure remote access, then it would be most helpful to convey those to the user, instead.

It's your project... given what you have said in this thread, you probably should have already disabled (removed) AiCloud.

OE

 

[DJones]

Just to give some perspective on Gnutons side he ran a poll for his fork of Merlin on his discord. Well it doesn’t have the same outreach as perhaps snbfourms still a interesting insight.

Join the GNUton's AsusWRT Discord Server!

Check out the GNUton's AsusWRT community on Discord - hang out with 419 other members and enjoy free voice and text chat.

discord.gg

 

[sfx2000]

View attachment 62756

Just to give some perspective on Gnutons side he ran a poll for his fork of Merlin on his discord. Well it doesn’t have the same outreach as perhaps snbfourms still a interesting insight.

Join the GNUton's AsusWRT Discord Server!

Check out the GNUton's AsusWRT community on Discord - hang out with 419 other members and enjoy free voice and text chat.

discord.gg

That's fair, but a really small sample size...

 

[majika]

AiCloud has its use cases but there are much better ways to do what is offered via AiCloud and which are more robust and Safer, for me It would NOT be a deal breaker if removed, S3 buckets is cheap, Cheap seedboxes for rsync/tor/plex/jelfin, etc, etc

If AiCloud was "decommissioned" and retired out of Merlins-FW I would see that as a good thing, I never use AICloud anymore, The whole idea is to shrink your attack vectors and surfaces, not to increase it onto a single point of attack/failure either,.

like years ago.. I used to mess around with some of the services offered: SMB / WebDav but I soon put a stop to that after the Vulns last done the rounds..

Personally, I tend to want to off-load as much workload from my Router/Gateway as possible and move said network features either downstream, deeper into my LAN offloaded onto either one of my dedicated devices: RiPi4 / RiPi 5's / x86's NUC Boxes / over into a dedicated Proxmox CT/LXC containers
Or push those same AiCloud features upstream to the cloud (off-premise) and continue to use CF tunnels to managed ingress/egress for my droplets/instances, forward Proxy > Gateway to tunnel traffic into/out my network. Pushing my Edge out past my LAN/WAN boundary.

With all that said, I'm only thinking from my own perspective, I know what to do to make things work whereas from the perspective of a outside who perhaps isn't so invested in this kind of on-premis / advanced networking / OpSec/NetOps it could be a deal-breaker as they may just want plug-n-play type deal.
Its definitely a tough decision one not to be taken lightly..

 

[nicoo]

leave it as it is. The moment you remove AiCloud there will be hundreds of questions why AiCloud was removed

 

[sfx2000]

leave it as it is. The moment you remove AiCloud there will be hundreds of questions why AiCloud was removed

That's easy to sort with release notes and why it was removed...

Worst case - we'll find out who was using it ;D