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Review on πŸš€ Enhance Your Network with the Ubiquiti EdgeRouter 6P: A Powerful 6-Port Gigabit Router with 1 SFP Port (ER-6P-US) by Temarquis Lopez

Revainrating 1 out of 5

Ubiquiti makes me sad

I'm a network engineer and I own and manage hundreds of Ubiquiti products in five states. I have almost every model of their EdgeRouter and EdgeSwitch products, plus a dozen wireless access points, switches, and Unifi controllers sitting next to me right now. I'm tired of crappy software, lack of support, toxicity and abuse. from this company. Where do I even start? Ubiquiti is good at marketing, hype, and social media, but bad at support, updates, fixes, and improvements. Marketing of Ubiquiti products is often intentionally vague and it can be difficult to know which features are supported and which are misunderstood. There are a large number of undocumented hardware and software limitations, such as switch supporting VLAN, some devices constantly run out of disk space (ERX), faulty ER-Lite USB drives and so on and so on and so on. I have long suspected that Ubiquiti uses paid barkers. Post photos of your products to Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit. Some of their resellers are also oddly affiliated with various communities and forums. Don't get carried away by the hype. Ubiquiti PoE is typically not 802.3 compliant. Some products support 802.3af/at/bt, some are passive 24V, some are passive 48V, some are passive 12V. Which product supports what? Who knows. Your marketing materials won't tell you. The community used to get upset about this a lot, so they ended up making an FAQ article about it, but it's outdated and hasn't been updated in years, so some products are missing. Countless devices have been destroyed because the wrong WiFi access point was plugged into the wrong switch or power supply. There are significant differences between what can be configured through the command line and what can be configured through the web GUI. For example, OpenVPN does not support a GUI at all, but is a widely used and advertised feature. Routing protocols are also very difficult or impossible to configure with a GUI. Troubleshooting with the GUI is next to impossible as there is no way to get many logs or results of status commands and counters. There are a significant number of configuration commands that simply won't work, resulting in errors like "The specified configuration node is not valid". or "Installation failed." Copying and pasting to/from the serial console is insecure and unreliable. Sometimes random characters are lost and the configuration gets corrupted. Holding the spacebar while running "Show Configuration Commands" often results in garbage output. Early EdgeSwitch models didn't even come with a serial console port. Bonkers. Security issues abound. For example, earlier versions of the EdgeSwitch operating system had a hidden, publicly writable SNMP community. It took them over a year to fix it and only when it was leaked in some news. Lots of unpatched security issues, privilege escalation exploits, and design issues. The official forum is toxic. Sometime in 2018/2019 they changed and now it has gotten even worse. Questions and comments are regularly censored and removed. Most questions and error messages remain unanswered. The forum is where hope dies. Most models do not have a bootloader recovery method, and the factory reset procedure leaves the user files and confirmation on the device. "Factory reset" does not result in "Factory reset". Configuration changes often take 20-30 seconds, even on high-end models. Using punctuation when naming ports or address groups can lead to serious errors. EdgeRouter DDNS doesn't really work. 48-port EdgeSwitch Lites are failing en masse. 48-port edge switches burn out power resistors and have other serious electrical problems. Unifi AC AP Lite will fry/burn when connected to EdgeSwitches. ER-Lite has a long history of known unfixed issues with drop/reorder/corruption of UDP packets. Routing policy not working, documentation broken. The vbash shell job control does not work. You can phono a process with "&", but "jobs", "fg" and other job control commands are missing. I've had issues where disabling VLAN interfaces didn't actually disable the interface and it still worked. "ip ospf process cleanup" does not actually restart the process. When a new interface is created, e.g. an IPSec VTI interface or an Ethernet VLAN/vif, OSPF does not advertise the new network even if it has a Network Advertisement Operator. You cannot create a firewall rule with multiple source and destination ports. No support for 802.11ad/LACP. The list of problematic bugs and incomplete or missing features goes on and on. Do yourself a favor and just buy something else.

Pros
  • Router
Cons
  • Socket required