Ubiquiti EdgeRouter Lite

7owners with an opinion

67%of verdicts positive

1/1positive/negative since 2024

0happy after 3+ years

Praised for reliability and performance; criticized for durability.

What people wrote

Doesn’t like it

the one key point was that the EdgeRouters had hardware acceleration The EdgeRouter Lite used a Cavium SoC, the EdgeRouter X family used a 32-bit MediaTek SoC. Hardware acceleration was buggy on both and is/was known to cause packet corruption. The main problem with the EdgeRouters was that Ubiquiti was basically just assembling off the shelf stuff. They didn't have the ability to fix SoC issues (or motivate the manufacturers to fix them). For years they didn't have the ability to do much Linux dev work either so the ER families languished on an end-of-lifed'd version of Debian. That experience and realization only motivated me to avoid future Ubiquiti products.

Likes it

Weird. I got sustained symmetric gigabit speed out of an EdgeRouter Lite when it was loaded with a basic firewall and some port forwarding. At the time I purchased it, the thing cost about ten months of your ISP-provided equipment rental. Maybe the later EdgeRouters are total trash, but the ERL could (and did) totally handle what you're describing.

Likes it

That's a known issue on Edgerouter X and Edgerouter Lite. I use an Edgerouter Lite and am on my third flash drive. The flash drives are just cheap USB drives, in contrast to X where they're soldered on. An industrial grade USB drive would cost almost the same as the device itself. I bought a 2 GB one but it refuses to install EdgeOS on less than 4 GB. However the device itself works well, and has three ethernet. As switch I use an EdgeSwitch 16 port, which provides PoE for the Unifi WLAN AP (UAP Pro or whatever). It all runs Linux, and I got root on the devices. Wouldn't want it any other way. Except perhaps a Turris Mox modular router or running the firewall/router on the same server as my NAS (as VM in Proxmox). But it allows less flexibility IMO. Then I would use OPNsense, Turris runs op OpenWrt. I don't want to use a proprietary OS like RouterOS or an out of date OS which is no longer supported.

Neutral

It takes a LONG time, depending on the machine(s) and architectures. pkgsrc has quarterly releases (2022Q1, 2022Q2, and so on). Alpha and UltraSPARC are fast and finish in a month or two, and can build any updates after the first run. SPARC (running on an UltraSPARC Sun Fire V100) and mips64eb (running on an EdgeRouter Lite) finish before the end of the quarter now and then, but I don't count on it. earm and earmv4 may get to the point where they can finish before the end of a quarter because it's trivial to add additional machines, but I haven't had the time or resources to do that yet. Also, there's an issue with distcc and earmv4 I haven't figured out yet. mipsel (Cobalt) and sh3el (Landisk) are not slowpokes, but are run as best effort. The Cobalt is a 250 MHz Cobalt RaQ2 with 256 megs of memory and a 500 gig SATA drive, and the SuperH machine is a 266 MHz SH4 with only 64 megs of memory and a 160 gig IDE disk. Both make use of distcc to help speed compiles. m68k is done by a small cluster of machines: a 1U Amiga 1200 with a Blizzard 1260 (50 MHz m68060), 256 megs of memory, and an SSD on a SATA-IDE, then an IDE-SCSI adapter, two Quadra 605 with 132 megs, two Quadra 610s with 260 megs, and two Quadra 800s with 264 megs. Two of those Macs aren't quite stable yet, but should be fully fixed for the next run. VAX is done by a VAXstation 4000/90 with 128 megs and a 4000/60 with 104 megs, both with fast, modern disks on SATA-IDE-SCSI adapters. Some staging and testing is done u…

Doesn’t like it

I would love to see NixOS-style declarative management brought to one (or more) of the BSDs. I'm currently building out a NixOS-based router to replace an old and dying Ubiquiti Edgerouter Lite. BSD would be perfect for the job but the ability of NixOS to have the entire system configured declaratively is enough of a killer feature to get me to use it over something BSD-based. if anyone is interested in pursuing something similar, I'm using [0] as my hardware base and [1, 2] as example configurations. 0: https://amazon.com/QOTOM-celeron-Processor-Fanless-pfSense/d... 1: https://francis.begyn.be/blog/nixos-home-router 2: https://github.com/stanipintjuk/nixos-router

Likes it

- Ethernet from local ISP that is fed into Ubiquity EdgeRouter Lite running OpenBSD (octeon platform) with extensive PF setup - 8 port managed switch connected to the router with a number of VLANs (IoT network, general/guest Wifi, trusted local network + Wifi, NAS Service Processor, DMZ network, externally accessible services network etc.) - 3 Apple AirPort Extreme WiFi access points (for various VLANs) + 1 in another room for extension via Ethernet. These run in bridge mode. - 2 more unmanaged Netgear 4/5 port switches (16 port managed switch is hard to get these days due to chip shortages and also significantly more expensive than the current solution) connected to the managed switch - another Netgear switch in the closet to connect the in wall Ethernet sockets from several rooms together - handful of Raspberry Pi boxes running Raspbian (Pihole/NTP server, another for Weather/environment monitoring, another for Docker to host some Wordpress - via Cloudflare tunnel, another for displaying weather information on eInk display, another for monitoring my working habits) - NAS running TrueNAS in Fractal design Node 304 case with 6 drives, PCIe SAS card (for redundancy/more robust checksumming), beeper for alerting. Backups done to Backblaze and also to internally strapped USB drive. Some of the stuff has alerting setup via PagerDuty (esp. the NAS and environment monitoring). General monitoring done by Grafana. Most of the stuff is located on the top of a large bookshelf. Except t…

Neutral

I recommend multiple layers. Why? Because some devices/apps will circumvent one of these layers one way or another. I use Pi-Hole plus WireGuard to route all my devices through my home broadband connection (so even on a hotel/train WiFi, when on LTE, etc). I forward it to Unbound which uses DNSSEC and DNSCrypt. I'm using an EdgeRouter Lite for that purpose. It does add a little bit of latency, but I don't mind, as it also increases my privacy on the insecure link. It also works on say a smart TV or an official Android device (I use a rooted Android device with microG which doesn't implement GAds). My partner sees barely any ads at home due to this setup (I did not bother to setup WireGuard on her smartphone as of yet). On each individual client device I also use a layer 7 firewall ("personal firewall"). On macOS I use Little Snitch and LuLu. On Linux I use OpenSnitch. I don't use Windows, but if I would I'd at least remove all the tracking stuff (for example with O&O ShutUp). On Android, I don't use a layer 7 firewall which is my bad. For browser, on every OS I use a configured Firefox (which I did NOT document; my bad!) with a bunch of addons. uBlock Origin (mainly to manually block "you are blocking ads" notices). I use uMatrix, Cookie AutoDelete, Smart Referer, Privacy Badger, Decentraleyes, HTTPS Everywhere, containers for Amazon/Facebook/Google (would like to add Microsoft), CanvasBlocker, Tracking Token Stripper, Forget Me Not, Terms of Service; Didn’t Read, and Buster:

Recommends it

I wonder, why, in today's world, people still use these for Firewall and NAS purposes. Both Mikrotik and Ubiquity offer low-cost systems under 100€, that have been purposed for FW+Routing and come with very capable firmwares, 4 network ports and, at least I know this about Ubiquity, specialized CPUs with hardware encryption. The NAS systems many vendors offer, use the same ARM CPUs for the low cost solutions, but offer more performance for a little bit of extra money, and then, sometimes, allow for ECC and real SATA, instead of these USB SATA bridges. If you want to tinker, you always can, because: it's a computer. I got a Ubiquity EdgeRouter-Lite as hardware firewall. It comes with: * 3 Gb Ethernet ports * 1 console port * fanless * EdgeOS, which is a (superb) Vyatta (Debian) clone * total cost, including PSU and nice metal casing: 90€ As for NAS, and backup in my parent's home I installed a WD MyCloud with 4TB, wiped off the firmware and installed a custom solution, that is available on the WD forums (OpenMediaVault). Price: approx. 155€, including PSU and nice casing. 10€ more, than the hard disk, that is inside, cost retail, back then. RAM could be a bit more, but this is for my parents, so the only one missing the RAM is me, when I am on vacation. At home I use two HP MicroServers. A 36NL and its update, I think it's named 40NL. * AMD CPU * 4x (real) SATA + 1 aux. SATA (I think it could do RAID, but I use ZFS anyway) * 16 GB ECC RAM * 1x Gb Ethernet * 1x remote control a

Likes itDoesn’t say they own it

My server is literally 2 meters behind me (yes, I mind the noise, don't cohabitate with full depth 4u machines, on the other hand it does help with heating this winter..)-- Static IP is most difficult, if you got that, you're good to go... If your website or app is light enough, sure, go with a pi4 or similar, don't put a fan on it, maybe a nice enough heatsink (use real thermal glue, NOT adhesive tape, some of the cheaper stuff actually melts and the block falls off).. Consider a 3 way router, like an edgerouter lite, so you can have a DMZ for the "server" so that if someone decides to visit, they're isolated from your other LAN machines.