3 ms·

They’ve lost my business.

karlshea 6y ago
I was pretty sure I’d never buy any more hardware from them after the UniFi 6.x releases, but after this I’m totally sure.
unstatusthequo 6y ago
Plaintiff lawyers will come into effect if there were actual damages as a result of this. Has anyone heard of actual breaches of their own networks as a result? If not, probably no actual damages = class action plaintiffs don’t care because no $ for them. Of course this is generalizing but this is usually the calculus. I know this because I am a cyber attorney.
- ejb999 6y ago
  even without actual damages, there will be a securities class-action lawsuit for anyone that lost money on the stock.; and as usual lawyers will collect big payouts, and shareholders will get a few dollars if they are lucky.
  - harry8 6y ago
    Get a few dollars from who? The owners of the company will have to pay themselves because they messed up? What a great reason to pay lawyers and clog up courts at taxpayers' expense.
kiwijamo 6y ago
Ditto and they have also lost my recommendations. If I hear any friends thinking of Ubiquiti, I will be pointing them towards articles like the one we are discussing. I had been a bit wary of then since their push for cloud SSO etc, but these recent events have put the final nail in the coffin for me. Personally I am migrating my family's network to MicroTik gear.
- lucb1e 6y ago
  A friend of my boss recommended Ubiquity semi-recently. We're a small IT company, plenty of theoretical expertise but no dedicated network admins, so it made sense to go on a recommendation. The fact that doing anything, for example assigning a VLAN to a switch port, requires you to first setup a mongodb server on your machine before you can install the controller software tipped me off to the quality of what we had bought. The device also gets like 80°C while idle. This controller software is now on isolated hardware, we trust the thing about as much as an old Android phone, and that was just from our impression as security people without knowing of any breach. I see it as a good thing that other friends of $friend will be spared that recommendation after this news.
  - gerdesj 6y ago
    It's not a massive ask to install MongoDB. Unifi stuff is quite cheap for what you get for a simple reason: Each one does not need to run a webserver and all that stuff. This means that the pretty stuff has to run elsewhere. For a single site you can use a phone app and for multi site setups and MSPs you have the controllers. The controller can be run on a Windows PC with a next next install or a Linux box with pretty minimal setup requirements. It sounds like you might want to go the app route otherwise if you are an IT company (I own a 20 person one - so also small) then find the one screen doc with around 10 copy and paste instructions once you have say a small Debian or Ubuntu minimal installed. You could also run up a Win10 VM and install the Windows distro quite easily.
    - amluto 6y ago
      Whatever one may thing of the quality of MongoDB, they are asking you to install a defunct version.
      - kiwijamo 6y ago
        And it only works with MongoDB shipped with older versions of Debian. The current Debian doesn't even have the most current version of MongoDB (due to Debian policy of backporting security fixes only) but even that is too new! In the future it would not surprise me the least to find that the only way to use the Unifi controller will be by using a non-supported distro.

I was pretty sure I’d never buy any more hardware from them after the UniFi 6.x releases, but after this I’m totally sure.

unstatusthequo 6y ago

Plaintiff lawyers will come into effect if there were actual damages as a result of this. Has anyone heard of actual breaches of their own networks as a result? If not, probably no actual damages = class action plaintiffs don’t care because no $ for them. Of course this is generalizing but this is usually the calculus. I know this because I am a cyber attorney.

ejb999 6y ago
even without actual damages, there will be a securities class-action lawsuit for anyone that lost money on the stock.; and as usual lawyers will collect big payouts, and shareholders will get a few dollars if they are lucky.
- harry8 6y ago
  Get a few dollars from who? The owners of the company will have to pay themselves because they messed up? What a great reason to pay lawyers and clog up courts at taxpayers' expense.

kiwijamo 6y ago

Ditto and they have also lost my recommendations. If I hear any friends thinking of Ubiquiti, I will be pointing them towards articles like the one we are discussing. I had been a bit wary of then since their push for cloud SSO etc, but these recent events have put the final nail in the coffin for me. Personally I am migrating my family's network to MicroTik gear.

lucb1e 6y ago
A friend of my boss recommended Ubiquity semi-recently. We're a small IT company, plenty of theoretical expertise but no dedicated network admins, so it made sense to go on a recommendation. The fact that doing anything, for example assigning a VLAN to a switch port, requires you to first setup a mongodb server on your machine before you can install the controller software tipped me off to the quality of what we had bought. The device also gets like 80°C while idle. This controller software is now on isolated hardware, we trust the thing about as much as an old Android phone, and that was just from our impression as security people without knowing of any breach. I see it as a good thing that other friends of $friend will be spared that recommendation after this news.
- gerdesj 6y ago
  It's not a massive ask to install MongoDB. Unifi stuff is quite cheap for what you get for a simple reason: Each one does not need to run a webserver and all that stuff. This means that the pretty stuff has to run elsewhere. For a single site you can use a phone app and for multi site setups and MSPs you have the controllers. The controller can be run on a Windows PC with a next next install or a Linux box with pretty minimal setup requirements. It sounds like you might want to go the app route otherwise if you are an IT company (I own a 20 person one - so also small) then find the one screen doc with around 10 copy and paste instructions once you have say a small Debian or Ubuntu minimal installed. You could also run up a Win10 VM and install the Windows distro quite easily.
  - amluto 6y ago
    Whatever one may thing of the quality of MongoDB, they are asking you to install a defunct version.
    - kiwijamo 6y ago
      And it only works with MongoDB shipped with older versions of Debian. The current Debian doesn't even have the most current version of MongoDB (due to Debian policy of backporting security fixes only) but even that is too new! In the future it would not surprise me the least to find that the only way to use the Unifi controller will be by using a non-supported distro.