7 ms·

Really a poor decision to come after Brian Krebs. The crossover between Ubiquiti customers and people that support Krebs, I would venture to guess, is quite hig

Really a poor decision to come after Brian Krebs. The crossover between Ubiquiti customers and people that support Krebs, I would venture to guess, is quite high. What a way to incinerate a pile of goodwill.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
joenathanone 5y ago
Yeah, I've spent hundreds of thousands with Ubiquiti and this has me seriously considering my choices.
- xuki 5y ago
  Can you recommend a good alternative for their APs in a home office environment?
  - walrus01 5y ago
    mikrotik has some pretty good 802.11ac standalone APs, such as this: https://mikrotik.com/product/cap_ac https://mikrotik.com/product/cap_ac for home use at this point I would also recommend mikrotik routers over anything ubiquiti edgeOS based, since they seem to have abandoned development on their fork of vyatta... the $50 edgerouter-x (ER-X) as a standalone wired gigabit router was a good choice in 2017 but not so much anymore.
    - ta988 5y ago
      The ER-X were good until you started to load them a bit too much.
      - walrus01 5y ago
        for the majority of use I recommended them for the speed/pps bottleneck was the last mile DOCSIS3 connection (150-350Mbps down x 16 up), wouldn't try to use one with an actual symmetric gigabit link.
    - Trias11 5y ago
      Also natively supporting ZeroTier, which is a must for me
    - james_in_the_uk 5y ago
      I like Mikrotik gear but IMHO their wireless stack isn't great. I moved my four HAP AC devices onto OpenWRT; speed and stability has been much improved, and roaming works much better. If you don't need WiFi 6 then I'd go as far as to say this is a great solution.
      - mbreese 5y ago
        How hard was it to setup the roaming? That has been my (one?) major complaint with my Ubiquiti APs - I have four of them scattered around my house/garage and moving between them always suffers a bit of a delay in handing over (or refusing to hand over at all). I recently migrated a router (not Ubiquiti) over to OpenWRT and have been happy with the stability. I read a bit about roaming, but thought it looked a little daunting.
        james_in_the_uk 5y ago
        Actually pretty simple. Here's an example: https://parkercs.tech/enabling-802-11r-fast-roaming-transition-on-openwrt/ https://parkercs.tech/enabling-802-11r-fast-roaming-transiti... I did lose the central management interface of Mikrotik (CAPsMAN) but for my home set-up this wasn't a big deal. I used the backup and restore capability in OpenWRT's LUCI interface to clone most of the settings. Roaming / fast transition now works much better. I do still lose a few packets as I wonder around but nowhere near as flakey as on the Mikrotik stack. I did spend an inordinate amount of time optimising channels, signal strength and placement etc. on the Mikrotik stack before migrating over, and so I kept these settings on OpenWRT. I think a lot of making wifi work well is in this particular black art. All things being equal, though, OpenWRT works better for me.
  - postpawl 5y ago
    TP-Link EAP225 V3
    - mike_d 5y ago
      TP-Link devices have been shown to ship with backdoors baked directly into the firmware. The TL-WDR4300 and TL-WR743ND have a special unauthenticated URL that causes the device to connect back to your IP, download a file, and execute it as root. The TL-WA701ND and similar models create a hidden SSID that acts as an unauthenticated bridge into your network. If you can even manage to report security issues to them, they will only patch models you specifically tell them are vulnerable. So as a researcher you have to buy one of every model to actually get things fixed.
      - Rebelgecko 5y ago
        Do those get overwritten if you use OpenWRT, or are they at a lower level?
        ynezz 5y ago
        Indeed, running latest OpenWrt release is the fix, yes.
      - postpawl 5y ago
        Can you send a link to reports of that issue on their standalone access points? Might just be their routers?
        mike_d 5y ago
        There are thousands of issues. I updated my comment with a few examples. They suffer from extremely poor code quality, a complete lack of understanding of security, and severe code reuse without recording what devices the code ends up in. You can take existing TP-Link exploits, poke around in a new model of device, and often find the same vulnerable endpoint under a new "hidden" URL. Edit: to address your specific question, CVE-2021-35004 is RCE against both routers and standalone APs.
  - emptysongglass 5y ago
    I love Synology. They have a great mesh offering that can be had cheaply second-hand. Even supports WPA3.
  - a-dub 5y ago
    every once in a while this question comes up and i find myself browsing around on amazon at single board computers with built-in wifi and four port switches that are for installing openwrt or linux/freebsd yourself on them that run about $300-$400 and wonder "why not?" are these any good? has anyone had any luck with going full oss for this stuff?
    - kuon 5y ago
      Pc engine APU2 works well with openwrt, but there is no wifi 6 yet. Also they seems to be put of stock.
    - dervjd 5y ago
      Yes, they’re great. Protecli is a solid brand with quality NICs (if a bit overpriced). I have several, running a mix of pfSense and Sophos Home for several years. Zero issues. Their Intel Atom units are plenty powerful for a gigabit cable connection. You can also search AliExpress for “fanless pfsense” and find lots of options for less $$$. For APs, you could also check out the Cisco Small Business line. Their 240 is the same hardware as some of their enterprise access points, and pretty trivial to set up.
    - squarefoot 5y ago
      Check out these systems. They seem the natural upgrade when looking for something more powerful than the already excellent pcengines.ch boards. https://www.ipu-system.de/ https://www.ipu-system.de/ If you are in the US, I'm pretty sure I saw very similar devices sold there as well, but didn't keep the link as buying from there would be too expensive.
  - 1over137 5y ago
    I've been happy with Ruckus. (No affiliation.)
    - gonzo 5y ago
      Seconded. EBay is great for picking up off-lease r610s and similar.
  - tim-- 5y ago
    I have really been enjoying the gear that comes from FS (fs.com). Late last year I kitted out my home with a switch and two wireless access points. The switch (S3410-10TF-P) does everything that you expect a switch to do. It has a pretty simple web interface, and a pretty comprehensive CLI. The access points are AP-W6T6817C (6800mbps WiFi 6, 802.11ax). It is rebranded from Ruijie Networks. The access points have a simple web UI for configuring everything, the range is pretty awesome. Multiple radios can be configured with separate SSIDs that have access to different VLANs. The usability is less than Ubiquiti, but it seems that they work a little better than my old UniFi setup that this replaced (though, that was purchased more than 8 years ago). There's WPA3 support. Getting data via SNMP into Prometheus means that you can see per-client usage history, too. Edit: Access Point AP-W6T6817C: https://www.fs.com/products/108707.html https://www.fs.com/products/108707.html Switch S3410-10TF-P: https://www.fs.com/products/115387.html https://www.fs.com/products/115387.html
- ta988 5y ago
  Good thing I am in planning phase. I will go see elsewhere.
mijoharas 5y ago
I'm halfway through outfitting my parents place with ubiquiti gear (following a successful half year of using in my own home). Now I need to decide whether to ditch what we've already bought, keep using half the gear, and use other companies for the other half, or eat the cost, and get rid of it. Not a cool move from them.
- andremedeiros 5y ago
  I went to mikrotik and never been happier. Do it.
  - Wistar 5y ago
    Although I wish Mikrotik sold directly from their web site. Did you buy from Baltic? That said, I am really excited about their forthcoming pre-paired PTP Gigabit link kit. I have been using ancient Ubiquiti paired links and need a replacement.
  - lostlogin 5y ago
    Can you recommend any models? I'm after as much speed as possible and ideally POE. It’s for a home setting. Their range is slightly daunting and I can't see anything that looks like what I want.
- fire 5y ago
  if you decide to get rid of it, I'm always open for donations!
- kijiki 5y ago
  A lot of ubiquiti wifi gear can run OpenWRT. Would at least insulate you from their cloud insecurity.
- that_guy_iain 5y ago
  So basically, at the thought of a company suing a reporter for lying, an allegation that has not been proven or disproven at this point. You're thinking about spending hundreds/thousands of dollars to not use stuff you've already bought from them? Like how does that hurt anyone but you?
Trias11 5y ago
Off my shopping list.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
technion 5y ago
There's a really interesting statement about mindsets here. Everyone I know in tech would probably agree with you, and consider suing reporters to be a bad approach. But everyone I speak to in business management seems to take the view that this strengthens their view of Ubiquiti.
- steve_mcdougall 5y ago
  Yes, because people in business management are known for their great objectivity, integrity and critical thinking prowess.
  - maznu 5y ago
    Indeed, and in this recent paper, it is argued that quite literally the opposite is causally true: https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w29874/w29874.pdf https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w29874/w298... "Within five years of the appointment of a business manager, wages decline by 6% and the labor share by 5 percentage points in the US, and by 3% and 3 percentage points in Denmark. Firms appointing business managers are not on differential trends and do not enjoy higher output, investment, or employment growth thereafter."
  - watwut 5y ago
    This is downvoted, but imo, kinda yes. The culture of business management is exactly as parent implies.
- joecool1029 5y ago
  >But everyone I speak to in business management seems to take the view that this strengthens their view of Ubiquiti. Ubiquiti basically needs to weigh whether it makes sense to get burned by Streisand effect now or cut their losses and hope journalists don't burn them again in the future when they don't do due diligence on a lead. After reading through the complaint, it looks like their demands are reasonable. What I'm more interested to know is whether never issuing a correction/retraction is going to work for or against Krebs.
alex_suzuki 5y ago
Fully agree. As a shareholder, I feel like I should part with my pile now. This just feels wrong.
sofixa 5y ago
Ubiquiti have almost no goodwill left. They have abandoned a few lines of ( well-liked) products, have introduced replacements which are inferior, buggy and try to entice you to pay for their cloud "solution" ( which as we've seen, is a dumpster fire). Then there were product upgrade ads in the UI. Then there's the generic lack of QA. And the fact they have multiple competing lines of products most of which are abandoned and the rumours are that it's basically shipping the org chart where the abandoned parts are due to teams leaving. On the homelab subreddit, they're no longer the go-to recommendation they were a few years ago.
- schappim 5y ago
  What is the go-to these days?
  - merlinscholz 5y ago
    I’ve swapped out all of my ubiquiti gear for Mikrotik. Granted, it is not as turn-key and fancy, but it gets the job done a lot better and especially cheaper.
    - logbiscuitswave 5y ago
      Thanks for the recommendation. I’ve been a long time user of Unifi kit but the utter stagnation of the entire product line has really made me want to start looking for other options. For instance, I keep hoping for an updated USG3 given the current one hasn’t changed since 2014 and can’t do IPS without throttling speeds to 80Mbps which is simply unacceptable these days, but all they seem to be doing is focusing on big and expensive 1U hardware which I just don’t have room for.
  - jabroni_salad 5y ago
    I really like aruba instant-on if you want something that is flexible but has enough handholdy features to get you through the usual tasks.
    - 5y ago
washadjeffmad 5y ago
That's an interesting take, because it's not "going after Krebs", it's setting the stage to recover from damages from an employee who manipulated and bullied their way into access and power by taking advantage of the trust of Ubiquiti's current and potential customers in Krebs. They're not suing to censor a researcher or to create a chilling effect on reporting about security or their company. They have to sue to show the court, their customers, and their investors exactly how Sharp manipulated public opinion to damage the company so he could "save it", how Sharp used Krebs' authority as a security reporter to damage the reputation and trust in their brand to apply that pressure and force leadership to act in the way he wanted, and to be able to claim appropriate damages by rightfully discrediting a false and inaccurate report. Krebs either has to weaken his own brand and admit he was played or stick to his guns that he faithfully reported. Either way, this lawsuit ensures he's got to correct the report.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

joenathanone 5y ago

Yeah, I've spent hundreds of thousands with Ubiquiti and this has me seriously considering my choices.

xuki 5y ago
Can you recommend a good alternative for their APs in a home office environment?
- walrus01 5y ago
  mikrotik has some pretty good 802.11ac standalone APs, such as this: https://mikrotik.com/product/cap_ac https://mikrotik.com/product/cap_ac for home use at this point I would also recommend mikrotik routers over anything ubiquiti edgeOS based, since they seem to have abandoned development on their fork of vyatta... the $50 edgerouter-x (ER-X) as a standalone wired gigabit router was a good choice in 2017 but not so much anymore.
  - ta988 5y ago
    The ER-X were good until you started to load them a bit too much.
    - walrus01 5y ago
      for the majority of use I recommended them for the speed/pps bottleneck was the last mile DOCSIS3 connection (150-350Mbps down x 16 up), wouldn't try to use one with an actual symmetric gigabit link.
  - Trias11 5y ago
    Also natively supporting ZeroTier, which is a must for me
  - james_in_the_uk 5y ago
    I like Mikrotik gear but IMHO their wireless stack isn't great. I moved my four HAP AC devices onto OpenWRT; speed and stability has been much improved, and roaming works much better. If you don't need WiFi 6 then I'd go as far as to say this is a great solution.
    - mbreese 5y ago
      How hard was it to setup the roaming? That has been my (one?) major complaint with my Ubiquiti APs - I have four of them scattered around my house/garage and moving between them always suffers a bit of a delay in handing over (or refusing to hand over at all). I recently migrated a router (not Ubiquiti) over to OpenWRT and have been happy with the stability. I read a bit about roaming, but thought it looked a little daunting.
      - james_in_the_uk 5y ago
        Actually pretty simple. Here's an example: https://parkercs.tech/enabling-802-11r-fast-roaming-transition-on-openwrt/ https://parkercs.tech/enabling-802-11r-fast-roaming-transiti... I did lose the central management interface of Mikrotik (CAPsMAN) but for my home set-up this wasn't a big deal. I used the backup and restore capability in OpenWRT's LUCI interface to clone most of the settings. Roaming / fast transition now works much better. I do still lose a few packets as I wonder around but nowhere near as flakey as on the Mikrotik stack. I did spend an inordinate amount of time optimising channels, signal strength and placement etc. on the Mikrotik stack before migrating over, and so I kept these settings on OpenWRT. I think a lot of making wifi work well is in this particular black art. All things being equal, though, OpenWRT works better for me.
- postpawl 5y ago
  TP-Link EAP225 V3
  - mike_d 5y ago
    TP-Link devices have been shown to ship with backdoors baked directly into the firmware. The TL-WDR4300 and TL-WR743ND have a special unauthenticated URL that causes the device to connect back to your IP, download a file, and execute it as root. The TL-WA701ND and similar models create a hidden SSID that acts as an unauthenticated bridge into your network. If you can even manage to report security issues to them, they will only patch models you specifically tell them are vulnerable. So as a researcher you have to buy one of every model to actually get things fixed.
    - Rebelgecko 5y ago
      Do those get overwritten if you use OpenWRT, or are they at a lower level?
      - ynezz 5y ago
        Indeed, running latest OpenWrt release is the fix, yes.
    - postpawl 5y ago
      Can you send a link to reports of that issue on their standalone access points? Might just be their routers?
      - mike_d 5y ago
        There are thousands of issues. I updated my comment with a few examples. They suffer from extremely poor code quality, a complete lack of understanding of security, and severe code reuse without recording what devices the code ends up in. You can take existing TP-Link exploits, poke around in a new model of device, and often find the same vulnerable endpoint under a new "hidden" URL. Edit: to address your specific question, CVE-2021-35004 is RCE against both routers and standalone APs.
- emptysongglass 5y ago
  I love Synology. They have a great mesh offering that can be had cheaply second-hand. Even supports WPA3.
- a-dub 5y ago
  every once in a while this question comes up and i find myself browsing around on amazon at single board computers with built-in wifi and four port switches that are for installing openwrt or linux/freebsd yourself on them that run about $300-$400 and wonder "why not?" are these any good? has anyone had any luck with going full oss for this stuff?
  - kuon 5y ago
    Pc engine APU2 works well with openwrt, but there is no wifi 6 yet. Also they seems to be put of stock.
  - dervjd 5y ago
    Yes, they’re great. Protecli is a solid brand with quality NICs (if a bit overpriced). I have several, running a mix of pfSense and Sophos Home for several years. Zero issues. Their Intel Atom units are plenty powerful for a gigabit cable connection. You can also search AliExpress for “fanless pfsense” and find lots of options for less $$$. For APs, you could also check out the Cisco Small Business line. Their 240 is the same hardware as some of their enterprise access points, and pretty trivial to set up.
  - squarefoot 5y ago
    Check out these systems. They seem the natural upgrade when looking for something more powerful than the already excellent pcengines.ch boards. https://www.ipu-system.de/ https://www.ipu-system.de/ If you are in the US, I'm pretty sure I saw very similar devices sold there as well, but didn't keep the link as buying from there would be too expensive.
- 1over137 5y ago
  I've been happy with Ruckus. (No affiliation.)
  - gonzo 5y ago
    Seconded. EBay is great for picking up off-lease r610s and similar.
- tim-- 5y ago
  I have really been enjoying the gear that comes from FS (fs.com). Late last year I kitted out my home with a switch and two wireless access points. The switch (S3410-10TF-P) does everything that you expect a switch to do. It has a pretty simple web interface, and a pretty comprehensive CLI. The access points are AP-W6T6817C (6800mbps WiFi 6, 802.11ax). It is rebranded from Ruijie Networks. The access points have a simple web UI for configuring everything, the range is pretty awesome. Multiple radios can be configured with separate SSIDs that have access to different VLANs. The usability is less than Ubiquiti, but it seems that they work a little better than my old UniFi setup that this replaced (though, that was purchased more than 8 years ago). There's WPA3 support. Getting data via SNMP into Prometheus means that you can see per-client usage history, too. Edit: Access Point AP-W6T6817C: https://www.fs.com/products/108707.html https://www.fs.com/products/108707.html Switch S3410-10TF-P: https://www.fs.com/products/115387.html https://www.fs.com/products/115387.html
ta988 5y ago
Good thing I am in planning phase. I will go see elsewhere.

mijoharas 5y ago

I'm halfway through outfitting my parents place with ubiquiti gear (following a successful half year of using in my own home). Now I need to decide whether to ditch what we've already bought, keep using half the gear, and use other companies for the other half, or eat the cost, and get rid of it. Not a cool move from them.

andremedeiros 5y ago
I went to mikrotik and never been happier. Do it.
- Wistar 5y ago
  Although I wish Mikrotik sold directly from their web site. Did you buy from Baltic? That said, I am really excited about their forthcoming pre-paired PTP Gigabit link kit. I have been using ancient Ubiquiti paired links and need a replacement.
- lostlogin 5y ago
  Can you recommend any models? I'm after as much speed as possible and ideally POE. It’s for a home setting. Their range is slightly daunting and I can't see anything that looks like what I want.
fire 5y ago
if you decide to get rid of it, I'm always open for donations!
kijiki 5y ago
A lot of ubiquiti wifi gear can run OpenWRT. Would at least insulate you from their cloud insecurity.
that_guy_iain 5y ago
So basically, at the thought of a company suing a reporter for lying, an allegation that has not been proven or disproven at this point. You're thinking about spending hundreds/thousands of dollars to not use stuff you've already bought from them? Like how does that hurt anyone but you?

Trias11 5y ago

Off my shopping list.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

technion 5y ago

There's a really interesting statement about mindsets here. Everyone I know in tech would probably agree with you, and consider suing reporters to be a bad approach. But everyone I speak to in business management seems to take the view that this strengthens their view of Ubiquiti.

steve_mcdougall 5y ago
Yes, because people in business management are known for their great objectivity, integrity and critical thinking prowess.
- maznu 5y ago
  Indeed, and in this recent paper, it is argued that quite literally the opposite is causally true: https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w29874/w29874.pdf https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w29874/w298... "Within five years of the appointment of a business manager, wages decline by 6% and the labor share by 5 percentage points in the US, and by 3% and 3 percentage points in Denmark. Firms appointing business managers are not on differential trends and do not enjoy higher output, investment, or employment growth thereafter."
- watwut 5y ago
  This is downvoted, but imo, kinda yes. The culture of business management is exactly as parent implies.
joecool1029 5y ago
>But everyone I speak to in business management seems to take the view that this strengthens their view of Ubiquiti. Ubiquiti basically needs to weigh whether it makes sense to get burned by Streisand effect now or cut their losses and hope journalists don't burn them again in the future when they don't do due diligence on a lead. After reading through the complaint, it looks like their demands are reasonable. What I'm more interested to know is whether never issuing a correction/retraction is going to work for or against Krebs.

alex_suzuki 5y ago

Fully agree. As a shareholder, I feel like I should part with my pile now. This just feels wrong.

sofixa 5y ago

Ubiquiti have almost no goodwill left. They have abandoned a few lines of ( well-liked) products, have introduced replacements which are inferior, buggy and try to entice you to pay for their cloud "solution" ( which as we've seen, is a dumpster fire). Then there were product upgrade ads in the UI. Then there's the generic lack of QA. And the fact they have multiple competing lines of products most of which are abandoned and the rumours are that it's basically shipping the org chart where the abandoned parts are due to teams leaving. On the homelab subreddit, they're no longer the go-to recommendation they were a few years ago.

schappim 5y ago
What is the go-to these days?
- merlinscholz 5y ago
  I’ve swapped out all of my ubiquiti gear for Mikrotik. Granted, it is not as turn-key and fancy, but it gets the job done a lot better and especially cheaper.
  - logbiscuitswave 5y ago
    Thanks for the recommendation. I’ve been a long time user of Unifi kit but the utter stagnation of the entire product line has really made me want to start looking for other options. For instance, I keep hoping for an updated USG3 given the current one hasn’t changed since 2014 and can’t do IPS without throttling speeds to 80Mbps which is simply unacceptable these days, but all they seem to be doing is focusing on big and expensive 1U hardware which I just don’t have room for.
- jabroni_salad 5y ago
  I really like aruba instant-on if you want something that is flexible but has enough handholdy features to get you through the usual tasks.
  - 5y ago

washadjeffmad 5y ago

That's an interesting take, because it's not "going after Krebs", it's setting the stage to recover from damages from an employee who manipulated and bullied their way into access and power by taking advantage of the trust of Ubiquiti's current and potential customers in Krebs. They're not suing to censor a researcher or to create a chilling effect on reporting about security or their company. They have to sue to show the court, their customers, and their investors exactly how Sharp manipulated public opinion to damage the company so he could "save it", how Sharp used Krebs' authority as a security reporter to damage the reputation and trust in their brand to apply that pressure and force leadership to act in the way he wanted, and to be able to claim appropriate damages by rightfully discrediting a false and inaccurate report. Krebs either has to weaken his own brand and admit he was played or stick to his guns that he faithfully reported. Either way, this lawsuit ensures he's got to correct the report.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]