I have a hard time believing anyone would actually use this versus self-hosting headscale in a discarded ThinkCentre and running it from a closet.

Not sure if you’re serious but reeks of “you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially”

Not serious, and you got it.

But Unifi should be able to implement this with zero extra hardware, just with VPN-style clients on phones and laptops?

I'm just surprised this needs an extra device. It would make sense if the device provided its own connectivity (with global wireless service, say), but this doesn't seem to be the case here. It still needs an uplink.

That's already an option, too.

Obligatory: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

I run OpnSense, Wireguard, hooked up to third party WiFi access points, and I had to do a lot of configuration and work that I wouldn't have had to do if I had just bought Ubiquiti equipment.

I did save money, a really significant amount of money.

Obviously, yes, I am capable of going through the work that eliminates my need for this product. I have no trouble configuring Wireguard and setting it up on my client devices and running through all that.

But it was a lot of work to get to this point and I had to spend a lot of time learning how to do that, even as a person who is already technical. Wireguard in particular took me a solid half a day to build understanding and get it configured.

If I was a little bit richer and I went back in time I'd probably just buy all Unifi. Actually if I went back in time I think with my same levels of wealth I'd probably just buy Unifi and save some precious time.

This specific device does seem like a really nice extension of their product line.

The catch is figuring out what's going to stick around and what won't.

I have a Ubiquiti EdgeRouter Lite that's a little over ten years old. At the time, it was revolutionary in its ability to pump a whole lot of data over a cheap device with a lot of features - but a lot of those features weren't available in the GUI at all; you had to go CLI and learn Vyatta (of which it was a fork) to do them. It's been updated over the years and is now much easier to use as the web interface exposes a lot more functionality, but it's not part of Unifi (and never will be).

Early on, I looked at and even tried one of their AP's. 100 Mbps wired uplinks for N wireless? No thanks. Even the one that I got to test with had absolutely abysmal range. Say what you will about TP-LINK generally, but their Omada unified control system had AP's that actually worked in my house. So the early Unifi stuff wasn't anything special, and based on how they had dropped the ball on so much of their early hardware (the EdgeRouter Lite had its software on an internal USB drive that, out of warranty, failed in a way that I was only able to diagnose with a serial console cable - at least it had a port so I could monitor it during boot, and searching for the error messages found a way to replace the thumbdrive and reload the software) I had no reason to go with them.

If I were setting someone up today, with all new gear, I might go Unifi, but I have no reason to spend any time at all replacing a system that works just fine.

What I didn’t like about TP-Link Omada was their weird requirement for a separate controller hardware thing, or running a controller server thing. If I remember right.

I ended up with the OpnSense box plus Zyxel APs. The Nebula cloud offering has been surprisingly good for me: it offers plenty of features in the free tier and the APs don’t actually need the cloud service to be configured if it were to be discontinued.

They phrase it oddly, I think to try to get people to buy a controller, but you only need it for setup, and the free software controller works fine for that. You only really need a hardware controller for a business environment where you expect to manage multiple sites remotely (it can be done remotely but isn’t worth the $80 you save vs having a hardware controller on site). Once configured, the devices will keep on doing their thing after reboots. You will have to fire it up for upgrading devices, but that’s no different from running Unifi without a controller with only AP’s - there has to be a provisioning controller somewhere to get them to work as a true network with seamless handoffs and the like. Otherwise, running in standalone mode, they are just like running consumer AP’s individually.

I have a hardware controller, but I will probably end up putting it in my in-laws’ house because software is fine for where I live. I actually set the whole thing up via software controller and transferred the config when it was all set and I would only be making small changes.

Time is your most precious commodity.

I’m in the market for a solid travel router, and my home network is all Unifi gear. This is a no brainer, especially with the built-in Teleport support.

I think so: it looks like "UniFi Teleport" is also based on Wireguard.

You can also do this with a travel router like one of GL.iNet's and Tailscale subnet routers.

UniFi teleport is also very buggy with frequent disconnects. Tailscale and WireGuard proper don’t have those issues for me.

How would Tailscale run in your home network without a hardware device to connect to?

You can create a subnet router on tailscale and access any device on your local network, regardless of them having tailscale installed

Sure but you need a device on the local network to run Tailscale so it routes to that subnet no?

Not to take away from this device, I think it’s pretty neat. But you can run tailscale on anything, even Apple TVs. If you have a Unifi network odds are that you have at least one spare computing device that can run tailscale.

Problem is that I think my Apple TV goes into some sort of deep idle mode where tailscale stops working. So it’s been effectively useless for me when I travel.

Check the Tailscale blog and docs for AppleTV. ISTR reading about an issue like this popping up and they had a workaround of some sort. Never happened to me.

Never had that, and I use that feature often.