You can do manual shenanigans but it's not recommended. And yes, more like Apple than like, say, Eero, since Apple lets you fiddle inside your Mac. You might be preferring the new Eero PoE Router and Gateway along with a few of the PoE WiFi 6 or 7 slim antennas.
Just need to find a network geek to give your present full time hobby a loving home. Make them pay cash and don't let them know where you live.
- You don't need a cloud key, or any other hardware to use the Unifi APs. You can SSH in or configure with an app on your phone. But you miss out on a lot of the features that make this hardware desirable. I ran a Unifi system for a long time with no controller or cloud key at all.
- I've never needed an internet connection to set up a Unifi system, in fact I typically get the local network setup and working, and configure the WAN as a last step. This provides the convenience of being able to consistently hit the router to debug issues.
- I can see the frustration of not being able to migrate the configuration from cloud key to gateway, but a migration is different from a restore, which is what a back up is intended to provide. In practice, I'd always plan to reconfigure if I'm changing hardware or software in the stack.
Unifi is indeed very Apple like (founded by ex-apple engineer I believe?) in both good and bad ways. I think their goldilocks deployment is large home / small businesses that need remote administration.
I purchased a Fibre Cloud Gateway (which is being given away), and there is exactly nothing you can do with it before you connect it to the Internet. It doesn't even let you begin setting it up.
The cloud management is great after setup, but not during setup because yeah you keep losing connection to it whenever you break the internet or whatever. This is greatly alleviated with their fancy 5G router they just released, which allows you to remote manage even if the internet is broken.
And honestly I think ubiquity makes it easier, not harder. At the expense of complete understanding what it does. It's just the networking itself is hard.
My router is an edgerouter-4 with a fiber port which is also from ubiquiti but for some reason it's not controlled by the ubiquiti controller. It has a web interface that's powerful but a bit of a mess in the sense it's managing an advanced router and there's just so much you can do you can't possibly have a nice interface for everything.
This has all been running 10+ years with very very little maintenance. It just keeps going.
I agree with the poster that if you are doing anything that is not a defined happy path for Unifi, it is a freaking nightmare and will likely involve rebuilding, resetting and readopting several times.
YMMV, though I suspect newer software on the device might be making a difference here.
Ubiquiti's niche really is the "I want Enterprise features but I also don't want to be my own CCIE to run this shit," and in that sense it overachieves nicely. Does it have idiosyncrasies? You betcha, and OP found this out first hand. Would I trust this for blind/hands-off remote site deployment? Hell naw, that's what Meraki is for. Would I build a data center around these? Maybe, depending on the data center's function?
Honestly, my wishlist for the product suite is a stronger focus on self-hosting, removing the Bluetooth app requirement for initial setup of hardware, improving zero touch provisioning, and letting me use Identity without having to tie it to their servers (e.g., local LDAP or SAML/SSO integration). That'd make me a happy dinosaur.
Setting up via a laptop with an Ethernet port was smooth sailing though.
[dead]
I say this authoritatively because I have a ‘huge’ small business deployment of like 20 UniFi devices, and the internet breaks virtually every time I change the complex routing setup. If it were not for this, my setup would be unmanageable.
I have to flip flop between unifi.com (for when I break the wifi routing) and local (for when I break the internet), but boy is having both options handy!
As for data centers, I should be clear on sizing: we're talking the same sort of footprints you'd see Meraki leveraged for (<10 racks, mostly traditional storage/hypervisors/big iron stuff), not HPCs and Hyperscalers and the like. Y'know, standard VLAN-based isolation, traditional load balancers instead of network overlays, maybe the odd eBGP for public cloud connectivity with the new Ubiquiti Network update. Areas where I don't need QSFP+ to endpoints and where budget forces me to choose between hardware and headcount (an area Ubiquiti and Meraki excel in). Even then, I'd really only lean into Ubiquiti over Meraki if I'm trying to conserve capital and I'm unsure of scaling: Ubiquiti is cheaper to replace if I need to scale up than Meraki, but Meraki's support is generally far superior than Ubiquiti since it's Cisco folk.
Could I build a data center on Ubiquiti? Totally. Would I? That's highly dependent on the specific context.