Product-review: Ubiquiti EdgeRouter Lite

[stig]

Hi Tim, I'm one of the developers working on this project. I'm glad you found my wiki examples helpful, but you make a good point about the initial config. I think you have some good tips in your article How to configure your ERL which I'll try to add to our wiki (or just link to your article).

 

[thiggins]

Thanks, Stig.

 

[Blexley]

Why only 3 ports?

That sucks as i would need at least 4.

 

[Fraoch]

Why only 3 ports?

That sucks as i would need at least 4.

Use a switch?

 

[Fraoch]

So - this router or a Microtik? I was thinking of the Microtik RB951G-2HnD.

The Microtik has a wireless module which I don't need though. It's cheaper than the Ubiquiti on the other hand, but the Microtik can't do little niceties like block ads with a hosts file. I'm pretty sure the Ubiquiti could do this because you have complete CLI access.

I am familiar with Debian and the command line, although the Ubiquiti sounds somewhat daunting because I'm less familiar with networking than I am with Debian.

 

[Blexley]

Use a switch?

LOL , Would you buy a brand new Blu-Ray player then link up a fugly old DVD-player to it with all the extra leads just so you had the correct functions that the Blu-Ray player should have had to start with?

 

[Fraoch]

LOL , Would you buy a brand new Blu-Ray player then link up a fugly old DVD-player to it with all the extra leads just so you had the correct functions that the Blu-Ray player should have had to start with?

Well that's what the pros do - they break out each device so it can do what it's designed for.

A consumer-level wireless router is really a router, a switch and a wireless AP all in one. But as the expression goes "jack of all trades, master of none." There are compromises in some parts of the design which make the whole unit weaker.

There's are two excellent articles right here on this site:

How to Improve Network Performance, Part 1

How to Improve Network Performance, Part 2

These articles advocate breaking these all-in-one units apart and choosing the best dedicated devices to perform one job only. A lot of very expensive commercial routers have few ports, really all that's required is WAN-LAN. That's why this Ubiquiti router has few ports, it's intended for low-level commercial applications where the end user would likely use a switch. The router does its job, then the switches do their job. Commercial networks even break down a router further and separate out its firewall functions using something like this:

https://www.barracuda.com/products

I just got an ASUS RT-N66U. But if you take a look at the router charts, this Ubiquiti EdgeRouter Lite beats it for LAN-WAN simultaneous throughput. However the RT-N66U has some of the of the best 802.11n wireless performance ever tested on this site. Wouldn't it be better to use the EdgeRouter as a router and the RT-N66U as a wireless AP? The combo would be faster.

Not that I need all that speed, I mean the RT-N66U has more than I'll ever need, but the Ubiquiti is better as a router. Its firmware is much more flexible and adaptable. I used to have a Linksys WRT54GL with DD-WRT and the router functions were much better than the RT-N66U. Wireless, not so much...

So another advantage to this approach is that if something better comes along, you can swap out that one component.

 

[Blexley]

All the mess of extra leads and plug socket is not something that appeals to me and i can see it being a pain when trying to troubleshoot network problems.

 

[Fraoch]

Tim:

I just got my ERL a few days ago.

Thanks so much for your article how to configure your Ubiquiti EdgeRouter Lite.

The Ubiquiti Networks community page contains a fair amount of configuration examples. Some are given as a series of CLI commands, some are given as config.boot files and some are given as .tar.gz archives that can be installed via the web GUI (although I just read that raw config.boot files can be installed via the web GUI as of EdgeOS 1.1.0).

I'm not afraid of the CLI but entering each command one by one is tedious and merges with the existing configuration, creating conflicts. I'm probably not doing it right though!

Installing .tar.gz archives is a snap but until EdgeOS 1.1.0, if the instruction set wasn't already in the proper archive structure (i.e. you just had a config.boot) it seemed you couldn't use it.

I really appreciated your advice to replace the config.boot in the archive. That worked perfectly.

This is an extremely powerful router and it has a lot of potential. The web UI is sometimes slighted in the Ubiquiti forums but it is by far the nicest UI I've ever seen for a router. Polished and professional looking, FAST FAST FAST, well-organized, informative, allows access to almost all router functions. Full CLI built in. Deceptively simple layout, no information overload.

 

[JoeJoe]

Why only 3 ports?

That sucks as i would need at least 4.

Get a 8 or 16 port gigabit switch for future expansion. This is what everyone does when building a network.

 

[Fraoch]

Incidentally if anyone is looking at this but lamenting over too few ports, Ubiquiti combined an EdgeRouter Lite with one of their ToughSwitches in a single case, added POE and came up with the EdgeRouter POE:

http://community.ubnt.com/t5/EdgeMA...combine-an-EdgeRouter-Lite-with-a/ba-p/498967

5 ports - all POE as well.

 

[Blexley]

If they are going to ruin it by adding a switch and charging more then it makes it even more pointelss.

Might aswell buy one of the faster wireless routers and just disable wireless.

 

[stig]

If they are going to ruin it by adding a switch and charging more then it makes it even more pointelss.

For the WISP market (Ubiquiti's biggest customer base) this make a lot of sense. A WISP tower has several radios that need power from PoE, but don't need a full gigabit of bandwidth. They also need a 1 or 2 full gigabit ports as back-haul to-from the tower. Normally these radios are power with a PoE injector. Being able to power them via the router and get rid of those PoE injector make thing cleaner (less wires and power cords). For example before/after picture of a WISP box - http://community.ubnt.com/t5/ToughSwitch/Why-I-love-the-Tough-Switch/m-p/333996/highlight/true#M911

I'm not a WISP, but I use one as my home router and power up 2 wifi AP's with it also. So might not be useful to every one, but certainly not pointless.

 

[stevech]

For the reasons above, Ubiquity is rather disadvantaged when purchased by a retail end user, i.e., support, warranty, updates.

 

[stig]

For the reasons above, Ubiquity is rather disadvantaged when purchased by a retail end user, i.e., support, warranty, updates.

Not sure I agree with that (but as an employee/developer of EdgeMax I'll likely biased). Check out how active the forum is - http://community.ubnt.com/t5/EdgeMAX/ct-p/EdgeMAX. How many other vendors do you know that have develoers monitoring the forum and answering questions themselves. For me I perfer this over some off-shore support sweat-shop that has a fixed set of question/answer and it take for ever to get bumped up the teirs to someone who knows what they're talking about.

Edit: Even Tim mentioned in his "Howto" that he posted a question on the forum and got an answer in 30 minutes on a Sunday.

 

[Fraoch]

Not sure I agree with that (but as an employee/developer of EdgeMax I'll likely biased). Check out how active the forum is - http://community.ubnt.com/t5/EdgeMAX/ct-p/EdgeMAX. How many other vendors do you know that have develoers monitoring the forum and answering questions themselves. For me I perfer this over some off-shore support sweat-shop that has a fixed set of question/answer and it take for ever to get bumped up the teirs to someone who knows what they're talking about.

Absolutely - this is a product that needs very detailed help. It goes well beyond a consumer router because you can do almost anything with it and because the most advanced features are over the command line.

You can get help on the forum directly from the developers and advanced users, usually within minutes. What's wrong with that?

I greatly prefer that to someone halfway around the world reading a script and starting with "does the unit have power"? I almost never call for technical support, it's easier and quicker to find the solution to an issue in forums anyway.

 

[jtherkel]

Uploading config.boot now works smoothly?

The SNB article How To Configure Your Ubiquiti EdgeRouter Lite includes a lot of details about uploading your EdgeRouter configuration. The article says you have to zip up your config.boot file in a specific directory structure that matches the one on the router.

On my EdgeRouter PoE (the 5-port version), I can upload a single plain text, unzipped config.boot in the web UI, and it loads with no issue. I previously upgraded the firmware to v1.3.0. I'm not sure if that helped, but I think they've solved that problem.

EdgeRouter Docs Still Need Improvement
I really appreciated that "How to Configure ..." article. Like Tim, I found it difficult to navigate the Ubiquiti docs and forums to locate some basic configurations.

The EdgeMAX Wiki is a good start, but it needs more examples. The forum thread Basic SOHO/Home Config contains a ton of info, with people trading configurations back and forth like baseball cards.

I love products based on open source, but this is a *product*, and Ubiquiti would sell a lot more with a little work on their docs. I just signed up for an account so I can add to their wiki. I'll see if I can contribute something useful.

Thanks,
John

 

[stig]

John thanks for the comments (both the positive and the constructive criticism). I think the software has evolved a LOT since Tim's initial review. Yes plain text configuration can now be loaded. Probably the biggest change came in v1.3 where we added a basic setup wizard were you basically pick if your WAN interface is (dhcp, static IP, or PPPoE) and the wizard configure your WAN, 2 LAN subnets, dhcp-server for each LAN subnet, stateful firewat, NAT masquerade, dns-forwarding, and if the WAN is PPPoE it will also create a MSS TCP clamp rule. So fare the setup wizard is limited to a 2 lan + 1 wan, but we plan to add more wizards.

As for the documentation comment, I would agree that it needs improvements. Ubiquiti is able to sell high performance gear at disruptive prices by keeping a very lean staff of mostly engineers. We rely very heavily on our community to help each other and I think if you look at our forums you'll see they are very active with lots of community members contributing knowledge base articles. How many other networking vendors do you see the actual developers of the product helping answer questions and getting feedback for future features?

Anyway, John we look forward to seeing you in the forum.

 

[stig]

sneak preview of v1.4

As a follow up to my last post I thought I give a sneak preview screenshot of a new port-forward wizard that we are currently beta testing. Early on our forum was flooded with questions about how to do port forwarding, not realizing that it entailed setting up a destination NAT rule and opening the appropriate firewall rule. To further complicate things people wanted to be able to use those same port forward from their LAN and that entails some confusing NAT hairpin rules. So we've added a port-forward wizard that creates all the NAT rules and opens the right firewall ports and if you want hairpin that just a check box.

As you can see this product wasn't really targeted at the consumer market, but the price/performance made it attractive to the consumer market. So we're trying to help that market with these wizard to simplify basic setups while leaving the powerful CLI for those power users that are doing more complicated networking.

 

[elpibe10]

... we're trying to help that market with these wizard to simplify basic setups while leaving the powerful CLI for those power users that are doing more complicated networking.

Good to hear that.

I classify myself as a semi 'power user' who has no formal education on networking (or Linux). I'm able to configure up to a MikroTik router (via webfig only) but that CLI thingy is indeed daunting.

I've already deployed a working UniFi system at home based on the latest beta firmware 3.1.9 along with a TOUGHswitch POE.

Always keen to get myself an EdgeRouter and if it has the GUI to match an Asus router, I'd see myself moving over.

Yes, leave the CLI to people who want something more than that but I think the GUI should at least match that of a top-tier consumer router (like the Asus ... stuff like IPv6, VPN server / client, Static Routing, Port Forwarding, etc.). That should really make it attractive to a much larger audience.