Get your free Meraki gear!
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@scottalanmiller said in Get your free Meraki gear!:
@travisdh1 said in Get your free Meraki gear!:
@scottalanmiller said in Get your free Meraki gear!:
@lance said in Get your free Meraki gear!:
@scottalanmiller Gotcha. Do you or @Dashrender know of any way to get Ubiquiti gear for cheap? Is there any reason not to buy used or older Ubiquiti gear?
Well, it's kind of all cheap. For home (lab) use you don't need much or big gear. Their starter firewall unit is about $55 and you own it, no support costs. That's pretty cheap. Finding used cheaper might be available, but hard. And that includes a tiny switch and PoE in that price! Their APs start around $65.
Which unit is that? The ER-X doesn't come with a power injector. It does use the same unit that comes with their APs, and does pass through so you can use an injector you got with one of their APs to power both.
That should work, I think.
@scottalanmiller That's actually how the ER-X and one of the AP we have is running right now. Convenient that.
@Dashrender said in Get your free Meraki gear!:
@travisdh1 said in Get your free Meraki gear!:
@scottalanmiller said in Get your free Meraki gear!:
@lance said in Get your free Meraki gear!:
@scottalanmiller Gotcha. Do you or @Dashrender know of any way to get Ubiquiti gear for cheap? Is there any reason not to buy used or older Ubiquiti gear?
Well, it's kind of all cheap. For home (lab) use you don't need much or big gear. Their starter firewall unit is about $55 and you own it, no support costs. That's pretty cheap. Finding used cheaper might be available, but hard. And that includes a tiny switch and PoE in that price! Their APs start around $65.
Which unit is that? The ER-X doesn't come with a power injector. It does use the same unit that comes with their APs, and does pass through so you can use an injector you got with one of their APs to power both.
The ER-X will give POE on the last port on the right, when looking at the ports, when just using the wall wart - try it.. I did and it worked.
POE, not Passive 24v, so it only works for Ubiquiti Pro APs.Ah, nice @Dashrender.
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@lance said in Get your free Meraki gear!:
@scottalanmiller said in Get your free Meraki gear!:
Ubiquiti gear is so much better, it's worth spending the money not to be saddled with Meraki stuff
Wow. Sorry for trying to give people access to free gear.
Attended the webinar, spoke to Cisco rep afterwards, did not want to send the gear. Number of Meraki installs I've done = 0. Number of Ubiquity installs = Lots.
Cisco lost out on a lot of sales over that 1 botched webinar.
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@Breffni-Potter said in Get your free Meraki gear!:
@lance said in Get your free Meraki gear!:
@scottalanmiller said in Get your free Meraki gear!:
Ubiquiti gear is so much better, it's worth spending the money not to be saddled with Meraki stuff
Wow. Sorry for trying to give people access to free gear.
Attended the webinar, spoke to Cisco rep afterwards, did not want to send the gear. Number of Meraki installs I've done = 0. Number of Ubiquity installs = Lots.
Cisco lost out on a lot of sales over that 1 botched webinar.
Yeah, to some degree the whole thing is a scam. If they want you as a customer, they send the gear without the webinar. If they think you are just going to use it at home or aren't going to be a big advocate for them, they don't send the promised gear even after you've "paid" for it by spending time in their marketing talk. They aren't honest and that alone is a reason to never use them - you can't trust them and as a security vendor, that's kind of important. You don't want con artists with control of your firewall and networking gear!
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@scottalanmiller @Breffni-Potter woudn't you guys fall under one of the categories "partner, reseller, or consultant" - these are specifically mentined as not being eligable to recieve free eqpt.
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@larsen161 said in Get your free Meraki gear!:
@scottalanmiller @Breffni-Potter woudn't you guys fall under one of the categories "partner, reseller, or consultant" - these are specifically mentined as not being eligable to recieve free eqpt.
Everyone in IT falls under that category. And everyone falls outside of it, too. Everyone I know that's ever gotten the free stuff falls under that category, too. And back when I did it, they were not mentioned as an exception until afterwards when they decided not to send them. Maybe they added it later when we started pointing it out regularly. They marketed the free stuff directly to consultants (which includes ANYONE working in IT) so clearly were not intended it to be so limited.
That's the handy thing about their wording, consultant can mean anyone in an IT role, even internal. Internal IT still consults to management.
And if they count "where you work" as a limiting factor, that implies that you can't use the freebie stuff at home, because it's qualifying your business class, not your personal one. I'm not personally any of those things. So would not be affected by them.
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@scottalanmiller said in Get your free Meraki gear!:
@Breffni-Potter said in Get your free Meraki gear!:
@lance said in Get your free Meraki gear!:
@scottalanmiller said in Get your free Meraki gear!:
Ubiquiti gear is so much better, it's worth spending the money not to be saddled with Meraki stuff
Wow. Sorry for trying to give people access to free gear.
Attended the webinar, spoke to Cisco rep afterwards, did not want to send the gear. Number of Meraki installs I've done = 0. Number of Ubiquity installs = Lots.
Cisco lost out on a lot of sales over that 1 botched webinar.
Yeah, to some degree the whole thing is a scam. If they want you as a customer, they send the gear without the webinar. If they think you are just going to use it at home or aren't going to be a big advocate for them, they don't send the promised gear even after you've "paid" for it by spending time in their marketing talk. They aren't honest and that alone is a reason to never use them - you can't trust them and as a security vendor, that's kind of important. You don't want con artists with control of your firewall and networking gear!
The more I search through reddit.com/r/homelab the more asshatery I find about not getting the gear. I'm going to challenge the Cisco rep that has been e-mailing me to just send me the gear without the webinar knowing it won't happen and in the meanwhile pickup some Ubiquiti stuff.
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@lance said in Get your free Meraki gear!:
@scottalanmiller said in Get your free Meraki gear!:
@Breffni-Potter said in Get your free Meraki gear!:
@lance said in Get your free Meraki gear!:
@scottalanmiller said in Get your free Meraki gear!:
Ubiquiti gear is so much better, it's worth spending the money not to be saddled with Meraki stuff
Wow. Sorry for trying to give people access to free gear.
Attended the webinar, spoke to Cisco rep afterwards, did not want to send the gear. Number of Meraki installs I've done = 0. Number of Ubiquity installs = Lots.
Cisco lost out on a lot of sales over that 1 botched webinar.
Yeah, to some degree the whole thing is a scam. If they want you as a customer, they send the gear without the webinar. If they think you are just going to use it at home or aren't going to be a big advocate for them, they don't send the promised gear even after you've "paid" for it by spending time in their marketing talk. They aren't honest and that alone is a reason to never use them - you can't trust them and as a security vendor, that's kind of important. You don't want con artists with control of your firewall and networking gear!
The more I search through reddit.com/r/homelab the more asshatery I find about not getting the gear. I'm going to challenge the Cisco rep that has been e-mailing me to just send me the gear without the webinar knowing it won't happen and in the meanwhile pickup some Ubiquiti stuff.
I'm kinda glad that I'm not the only one, lol. It was years ago that I tried it, long before UBNT was available or that I had heard of it. Back when I really wanted to get hands on with their gear. Now I've used it a lot over the years and... not so impressed. Now I know why they didn't want technical people to use it, it's only "cool" to non-technical managers that can be easily led around by the sales guys.
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Yeah I did one before looking at the Ubiquiti stuff and never got the free AP.... But I think that was my fault to saying there was little chance of me deploying the Cisco stuff due to costs lol
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@hobbit666 said in Get your free Meraki gear!:
Yeah I did one before looking at the Ubiquiti stuff and never got the free AP.... But I think that was my fault to saying there was little chance of me deploying the Cisco stuff due to costs lol
The percentage of chance shouldn't be a factor when you've just spent your time earning the device.
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@larsen161 said in Get your free Meraki gear!:
@scottalanmiller @Breffni-Potter woudn't you guys fall under one of the categories "partner, reseller, or consultant" - these are specifically mentined as not being eligable to recieve free eqpt.
Where was this specifically mentioned? Oh yes they wheeled that out after the webinar but it was required. The TLCs I read said "Businesses only, valid business details required, must attend webinar" and that was the only requirement.
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@Breffni-Potter said in Get your free Meraki gear!:
@larsen161 said in Get your free Meraki gear!:
@scottalanmiller @Breffni-Potter woudn't you guys fall under one of the categories "partner, reseller, or consultant" - these are specifically mentined as not being eligable to recieve free eqpt.
Where was this specifically mentioned? Oh yes they wheeled that out after the webinar but it was required. The TLCs I read said "Businesses only, valid business details required, must attend webinar" and that was the only requirement.
Same here. I was never presented with any limitations that I knew of until we asked why the devices wasn't sent. Then they started making excuses.
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Either I gave them what they wanted (business info - which I'm sure I did, even though I NEVER intended to buy it for us, I knew the price was way to much), or they weren't paying that close attention to my situation back then.
It was over 3 years ago, I got a notice to renew my subscription sometime in the past year or so.
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I currently have Aruba in my office and it sucks. Zero handoff for the nomads in the back is no problem. The problem seems to be the way Aruba handles RADIUS for the front. No matter.
I am considering trying out Ubiquiti. Devices seems cheap enough in comparison to Aruba and like the fact of the free controller, either in the cloud or on-prem. However, I do have a question. If I have APs at one location and the controller is in my colo (geographically separate) and both locations lose connection for some reason, do the APs keep operating or do they stop?
Also, in the time frame that y'all have been putting them in, how many times have you had to do any support calls on them and were they because of an AP device failure?
Should I start another thread on this?
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@NerdyDad yes, new thread is good.
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Apparently I am one of the few who actually got a free MX64 and a free AP for watching the Meraki webinars (both earlier this year).
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@NetworkNerd said in Get your free Meraki gear!:
Apparently I am one of the few who actually got a free MX64 and a free AP for watching the Meraki webinars (both earlier this year).
LOl of course, you drop your company's name and vendors line up to give you stuff.
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Apparently I'm also in the minority here to think that Meraki gear isn't junk. I didn't really get to play with their APs and didn't have a need to since we used Ubiquiti gear for APs (which worked great).
I will say my only experience is with the Meraki MX appliances. I've seen a number of folks advocate the Ubiquiti ERL or other router model over most anything in terms of bang for the buck. But I don't think when comparing the MX appliances to something like an ERL you're comparing apples to apples. The ERL is a true firewall. That's what it does and was built to do. The MX appliances fall more in the UTM area and provide capabilities like web filtering, intrusion detection, malware prevention, and firewall functionality. While I agree the price of Meraki can be unattractive because of the recurring subscription cost, the gear was built to make administration simple. And it certainly is. If you take the cost of having a separate web filter and a separate IPS / IDS, does the cost of Meraki really become so astronomical?
I don't claim to have used the Ubiquiti firewalls. Based on a quick glance at the guide they seem quite nice and provide a CLI, which you won't get with a Meraki.
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@NetworkNerd said in Get your free Meraki gear!:
But I don't think when comparing the MX appliances to something like an ERL you're comparing apples to apples. The ERL is a true firewall. That's what it does and was built to do. The MX appliances fall more in the UTM area and provide capabilities like web filtering, intrusion detection, malware prevention, and firewall functionality.
That alone is another vote for the ERL approach as generally UTMs are considered to be a bad thing.
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@scottalanmiller said in Get your free Meraki gear!:
@NetworkNerd said in Get your free Meraki gear!:
But I don't think when comparing the MX appliances to something like an ERL you're comparing apples to apples. The ERL is a true firewall. That's what it does and was built to do. The MX appliances fall more in the UTM area and provide capabilities like web filtering, intrusion detection, malware prevention, and firewall functionality.
That alone is another vote for the ERL approach as generally UTMs are considered to be a bad thing.
Because so many functionalities are tied to one device and they should be separated?
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@NetworkNerd said in Get your free Meraki gear!:
If you take the cost of having a separate web filter and a separate IPS / IDS, does the cost of Meraki really become so astronomical?
Yes, without question. It's one of the most ridiculously priced products on the market. And they are slow (even by Cisco standards) and not very reliable.
