Ubiquiti - Warranty, Support Life, OpenWRT

[cjake]

Hi all. A few questions regarding Ubiquiti.

I've seen a number of deals appear for their items on Newegg. While I would like to purchase several products, I see people mention that they are not an authorized reseller. That seems to be true when I check the reseller list myself. Is it true that Ubiquiti items purchased on Newegg will not receive warranty support from Ubiquiti?

How long has the Edgerouter X been around, and if a person had to venture a guess, how much longer will it continue to be supported?

Is anyone using the Edgerouter X with OpenWRT on it? What's your experience like with it vs the default OS?

Cheers.

 

[System Error Message]

Hi all. A few questions regarding Ubiquiti.

I've seen a number of deals appear for their items on Newegg. While I would like to purchase several products, I see people mention that they are not an authorized reseller. That seems to be true when I check the reseller list myself. Is it true that Ubiquiti items purchased on Newegg will not receive warranty support from Ubiquiti?

How long has the Edgerouter X been around, and if a person had to venture a guess, how much longer will it continue to be supported?

Is anyone using the Edgerouter X with OpenWRT on it? What's your experience like with it vs the default OS?

Cheers.

when you buy ubiquiti new from anywhere, warranty must be given. Anyone can be a seller/distributor. For any product you first have the seller warranty, when that expires or doesnt apply, the warranty goes to ubiquiti for however long they define. For instance i believe mikrotik offers 1 year warranty themselves through the sellers.

Save your money and get mikrotik instead. I use ubiquiti as an embedded linux device rather than a router as its actually better at that. Ubiquiti calls their fanbase fanatical and do quite a lot of things that are disgusting as a business. This is partly why i have not bought any ubiquiti product other than the ERPRO a while ago.

If you really dont have the skill dont bother with ubiquiti, many other good brands out there.

 

[cjake]

when you buy ubiquiti new from anywhere, warranty must be given. Anyone can be a seller/distributor. For any product you first have the seller warranty, when that expires or doesnt apply, the warranty goes to ubiquiti for however long they define. For instance i believe mikrotik offers 1 year warranty themselves through the sellers.

Save your money and get mikrotik instead. I use ubiquiti as an embedded linux device rather than a router as its actually better at that. Ubiquiti calls their fanbase fanatical and do quite a lot of things that are disgusting as a business. This is partly why i have not bought any ubiquiti product other than the ERPRO a while ago.

If you really dont have the skill dont bother with ubiquiti, many other good brands out there.

Much appreciated. That's good to know. I saw one or two other posts in various forums about their business practices, but I've had no direct details as to what they've done.

My questions didn't stem so much from the point of a lack of skills, but more out of the curiosity of taking a relatively inexpensive device and seeing how well it worked. What I would actually like is a pfsense box, but I've never been able to find one that is both inexpensive and power efficient. I liked the fact that OpenWRT is an option for the Edgerouter X, and thought it would be nice to experiment with it on this device as well as the default OS.

That said, I didn't want to invest $50 bucks in the device if it was likely to be EOL. I don't have enough knowledge to know their product lineup in terms of support and how likely their stuff has been around or likely to be supported.

 

[System Error Message]

Much appreciated. That's good to know. I saw one or two other posts in various forums about their business practices, but I've had no direct details as to what they've done.

My questions didn't stem so much from the point of a lack of skills, but more out of the curiosity of taking a relatively inexpensive device and seeing how well it worked. What I would actually like is a pfsense box, but I've never been able to find one that is both inexpensive and power efficient. I liked the fact that OpenWRT is an option for the Edgerouter X, and thought it would be nice to experiment with it on this device as well as the default OS.

That said, I didn't want to invest $50 bucks in the device if it was likely to be EOL. I don't have enough knowledge to know their product lineup in terms of support and how likely their stuff has been around or likely to be supported.

the old ER-X is EOL in a sense. With openwrt, you can salvage almost any consumer router to test and even mikrotik has openwrt compatible routers too. If you wish to give this sort of router line a try, pfsense and mikrotik are good options. With ubiquiti it is an option too if you get their recent models but i never recommend edgerouters, only their other products.

 

[netwrks]

The ERX(-SFP) is far from EOL. That platform is about 3 years old. Still selling lots. Still gets updates. Always best to get any info from the source: https://www.ubnt.com/

 

[cjake]

the old ER-X is EOL in a sense. With openwrt, you can salvage almost any consumer router to test and even mikrotik has openwrt compatible routers too. If you wish to give this sort of router line a try, pfsense and mikrotik are good options. With ubiquiti it is an option too if you get their recent models but i never recommend edgerouters, only their other products.

To be honest I had sort of dismissed the Mikrotik line originally, but now I'm more interested. Two questions for you:
1) How good is the support for the included OS (i.e. does it get patched and updated regularly)?
2) Any experience with installing OpenWRT on, for example, the Hex RB750Gr3 ?

As for pfsense, for low power consumption more "affordable" devices, is the apu2c4 my best option, or do you have other suggestions?

 

[System Error Message]

To be honest I had sort of dismissed the Mikrotik line originally, but now I'm more interested. Two questions for you:
1) How good is the support for the included OS (i.e. does it get patched and updated regularly)?
2) Any experience with installing OpenWRT on, for example, the Hex RB750Gr3 ?

As for pfsense, for low power consumption more "affordable" devices, is the apu2c4 my best option, or do you have other suggestions?

Updates for mikrotik RouterOS is pretty regular with old models still being supported. Even my RB450G still gets updates despite being a decade old.

I've not installed openWRT yet on the any mikrotik router, however you can use openWRT to hack various mikrotik routers to enable them to do amazing things. Before you purchase a mikrotik router, if you plan to use openWRT on one, look at the openWRT wiki for a well supported model that fits what you need in terms of hardware as well.

For pfsense, its more to do with the x86 CPU. newer CPUs are more power efficient and you dont have to go all the way down. For instance your mainstream CPUs may consume 75W on full load but can consume only a few watts on low loads. Some choose intel atom based CPUs because of their lower power consumption and ARM based routers arent far from x86 in performance/watt either as thats what this is mainly about. Intel ATOM based systems tend to have a lower profile or a board with less things which helps it to consume less power, same with the ram choices as well. When using PFsense it is certain that it will consume more power than a consumer router but that is because more features get utilised on pfsense that consumer routers dont have and arent capable of doing at a good speed. Before you pick your pfsense box just keep a look out for these things:
Intel NICs (well supported and low CPU usage)
CPU (low power CPUs are fine but must support all the features you plan to use at the speed you want)
RAM amount (PFsense doesnt require fast RAM for 1Gb/s WAN but if you plan to use 10Gb/s WAN ram speed matters, ram amount dependent on features you will use.)

The best thing you can do for pfsense is to get yourself a decent x86 chip, with some ram (at least 8GB if you plan to learn and use many features), and m.2 SSD and an intel NIC. For instance you could get a micro ATX or mini ITX ryzen/intel quad core or even an intel atom based pentium (all dependent on price) with a single 8GB of ram stick and an intel dual or quad port gigabit NIC. Some motherboards already come with an intel NIC even for AMD CPUs as well as while realtek has its advantages pfsense does very well on intel NICs. Power usage isnt going to be much higher than a consumer router and you'll have all the hardware resources you need to try out everything pfsense offers at a decent speed. For instance you could use IDS/IPS and transparent proxy on pfsense with snort and other firewalls using a hard drive/SSD as cache.

 

[umarmung]

The next version of pfSense, 2.5, will not work with any old CPU, but requires AES-NI (or similar) instructions: https://www.netgate.com/blog/pfsense-2-5-and-aes-ni.html

pfSense is also not the only way to do a custom router. If you actually need to maximise use of the hardware, you could do significantly better with just the underlying OS like Linux or FreeBSD. Jim Salter did a good series of articles on ARSTechnica about his homebrew router with a lot of testing.

 

[sfx2000]

pfSense is also not the only way to do a custom router. If you actually need to maximise use of the hardware, you could do significantly better with just the underlying OS like Linux or FreeBSD. Jim Salter did a good series of articles on ARSTechnica about his homebrew router with a lot of testing.

The big challenge with rolling one's own is what to do when things go wrong - is @Jim Salter going to help you?

Probably not...

 

[coxhaus]

If you are looking at setting up pfsense as an IDS/IPS you should look at Untangle. It is much easier to setup.
When I added snort to my pfsense the response time increased. I was running an old Xeon on an Intel server motherboard with 2 Intel NICs. Which averaged under 3% under load.

 

[MichaelCG]

There are always trade-offs with any decision.

Commercial (Cisco, Meraki, Checkpoint, Fortinet, etc)
- paid support
- when broke, call someone to fix it
- hardware and software usually optimized together (or at least validated to be compatible)
- cost $$$

Free Platforms (pfSense, OPNsense, etc)
- community supported
- most of the heavy lifting and hard work is already done and packaged up
- when broke, check the forums
- sometimes more difficult to find optimized hardware
- once setup, check for security updates, otherwise set it and forget it

Build your own
- you can do what ever you want with it
- customized anything and everything
- maintenance is on you
- all heavy lifting of configuration, customization, and maintenance are on you
- If you want to tinker or have a unique use case, this is for sure the right path

 

[Jim Salter]

The big challenge with rolling one's own is what to do when things go wrong - is @Jim Salter going to help you?

Probably not...

Well, theoretically, sure, I could. I am a mercenary sysadmin. Of course, I only scale so far... but that's not necessarily an issue; if you want commercial support, it's easily available from much bigger shops than me. If you set up a vanilla router like I did on Ubuntu, Canonical provides support contracts, and there's literally nothing in there that isn't covered by a commercial support contract - it's the base system and one or two things out of the main repo. If you don't like Canonical, you could do a nearly identical setup on RHEL or Suse and get commercial support from the vendor there.

Kinda the whole point of the homebrew router - for me, at any rate - was not needing really specific support on some relatively small software package, because everything it's doing is a part of the distribution itself. Granted, I'm not really one for buying support from Canonical or RHEL because it's kinda my job to know how all that stuff works anyway, but that doesn't mean it's not a viable option for the kind of shop that does buy commercial support.

 

[Jim Salter]

There are always trade-offs with any decision.

Commercial (Cisco, Meraki, Checkpoint, Fortinet, etc)
- paid support
- when broke, call someone to fix it
- hardware and software usually optimized together (or at least validated to be compatible)
- cost $$$

Free Platforms (pfSense, OPNsense, etc)
- community supported
- most of the heavy lifting and hard work is already done and packaged up
- when broke, check the forums
- sometimes more difficult to find optimized hardware
- once setup, check for security updates, otherwise set it and forget it

Probably worth noting that pfSense can be free/community supported, or you can buy an appliance (or pay for a license on your own hardware) and get commercial support also, much like (as I said in the post above) you can get commercial support on a "do it yourself" linux option by using a commercially supported distro.

 

[sfx2000]

Well, theoretically, sure, I could. I am a mercenary sysadmin. Of course, I only scale so far... but that's not necessarily an issue; if you want commercial support, it's easily available from much bigger shops than me. If you set up a vanilla router like I did on Ubuntu, Canonical provides support contracts, and there's literally nothing in there that isn't covered by a commercial support contract

I would agree - challenge here is that there are many here that just don't have the skills to troubleshoot if a recipe doesn't work. And few have the time and resources to keep on top of things.

I've done a couple of CPE/Router devices - even gone as far as building a distro specifically targeting the SOHO space (on my own dime I must add - hardware and software - because, itch needed to be scratched, and we did something cool). Better yet, was able to join up with some other folks that had something promising that would be really freaking cool in the enterprise space - userland networking daemons seem to be a thing again with certain kernel hacking and virtualization...

That being said - We can spin up a BSD or Linux box and make a router that is pretty darn fast, but it's the back end that is really important... and that's why I'm like - gosh - Jim's doing this...

Design - Develop - Deploy - Sustain - it's the last two parts that are hard actually...

 

[umarmung]

The fact is that you can create your own extremely powerful router with just off-the-shelf consumer hardware and free, open source software. Most consumer routers run on some variation of the Linux kernel anyway. This has been the case for longer than many people have been alive.

Given the direction everything is heading, where so much is being done in software, the commoditization and rapidly approaching limits of "powerful-enough" CPUs, and the scaling up of tooling such as containers and virtualization, it should become increasingly easier for anyone with even moderate technical ability to just "spin up" a router (think Docker) on off-the-shelf hardware and keep it up to date just like any other router software, i.e. going down from Nerd to Power User level.

Worst case scenario is that you just fallback to specialist router software on that exact same hardware, e.g. pFsense, Mikrotik RouterOS and the like, and you have lost nothing but time.

Also, keep in mind technical journalists are often demonstrating the cutting edge, whatever that may be, in whatever exciting ways as possible. In this case, it is less about the software than it is about the commodity hardware. It is not as if the journalists have to also take on board responsibilities to be someone's parent, teacher, IT administrator, or whatever, and therefore telling people what to do in most situations.

Some of the setups you'd see on something like the insanely popular Linus Tech Tips or even on much more conservative technical Youtube channels is downright ridiculous from a pragmatic perspective, but is no less valuable for illustrating what can be done. This is the stuff that also inspires people to try new things, even to create a new ecosystem for others.

(sfx2000) Your perspective seems far technically deeper, targeting strong optimization and resource efficiency, and is business oriented.

 

[sfx2000]

Your perspective seems far technically deeper, targeting strong optimization and resource efficiency, and is business oriented.

Yah - and it's been up and down - ticket buys the seat perhaps, and there... one rides on the edge while you can - couple of good ideas and some decent cash behind it...

Looking for something new to do these days - wasn't a good fit there...