Getting up and running with ER-X?
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I have an ER-X sitting in a box that I want to deploy.
It's for a home office. One port to WAN, one to LAN, one to WiFi AP, one to 4G router (backup).
Besides the usual stuff I also need to set up an IPsec site-to-site.I haven't set one of these up before but I know you guys do this all the time.
Any recommendations on how I should get up to speed on this? What should be my first step? Where do I start? -
@Pete-S look up youtube videos by Lawrence Systems. I think he does a great job of explaining things and is where I turned to when I first started using them.
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Another company on Youtube is Crosstalk Solutions
He has a series from Kevin Houser who wrote the book "The Unauthorized Guide To Ubiquiti Routing And Switching Vol1"
This series shows you how to set up and configure your Edge Router from start to finish along with networking concepts.I highly recommend this series. It starts here:
*Edit = I am going to rewatch the series as it has been a while and I want to reconfigure my Edge router to setup a second AP Lite plus secure my network at home a little more.
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@Pete-S said in Getting up and running with ER-X?:
Any recommendations on how I should get up to speed on this? What should be my first step? Where do I start?
The ER-X is annoying because you have to power it up and connect to eth0 with a static IP in the 192.168.1.0/24 subnet. The Entire ER line is like that, but all the other devices have a console port to get around that.
- Download the current firmware to your laptop.
https://dl.ui.com/firmwares/edgemax/v2.0.8-hotfix.1/ER-e50.v2.0.8-hotfix.1.5278088.tar - Power up the ER-X
- Set your laptop to 192.168.1.2/24 and connect to eth0
- Pop a browser to 192.168.1.1
- log in with ubnt/ubnt
- Update the firmware and reboot
- Run the setup wizard
- Disconnect from eth0.
- Put your internet on eth0 and your network on eth1
After that, you should have a working router and can start to play with other settings.
- Download the current firmware to your laptop.
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@pmoncho +1 to CrossTalk's videos. They're good.
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@EddieJennings said in Getting up and running with ER-X?:
@pmoncho +1 to CrossTalk's videos. They're good.
I really dislike crosstalk. But this series is not by him, so probably good.
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@JaredBusch said in Getting up and running with ER-X?:
@EddieJennings said in Getting up and running with ER-X?:
@pmoncho +1 to CrossTalk's videos. They're good.
I really dislike crosstalk. But this series is not by him, so probably good.
What is the issue with Crosstalk? (Peaked my interest)
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@JaredBusch said in Getting up and running with ER-X?:
@EddieJennings said in Getting up and running with ER-X?:
@pmoncho +1 to CrossTalk's videos. They're good.
I really dislike crosstalk. But this series is not by him, so probably good.
Curious. The videos I've watched with this particular speaker have seemed to be good quality.
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@EddieJennings said in Getting up and running with ER-X?:
@JaredBusch said in Getting up and running with ER-X?:
@EddieJennings said in Getting up and running with ER-X?:
@pmoncho +1 to CrossTalk's videos. They're good.
I really dislike crosstalk. But this series is not by him, so probably good.
Curious. The videos I've watched with this particular speaker have seemed to be good quality.
This speaker seems good. i only listened to a few minutes.
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@pmoncho said in Getting up and running with ER-X?:
@Pete-S the problem with this video is the outdated firmware he sets up with to start. It does not have the modern wizard that UBNT now includes.
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@pmoncho a friend of one of our customers got hoodwinked by the Crosstalk guys! They sold him some piece of junk that was literally less than a free phone system and billed him $5,000 for the privilege of getting screwed.
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@pmoncho said in Getting up and running with ER-X?:
@JaredBusch said in Getting up and running with ER-X?:
@EddieJennings said in Getting up and running with ER-X?:
@pmoncho +1 to CrossTalk's videos. They're good.
I really dislike crosstalk. But this series is not by him, so probably good.
What is the issue with Crosstalk? (Peaked my interest)
Well, our experience is just from customers, but they basically sell free software, deployed poorly, for insane money.
We were pricing out something for a customer and it was like $200 and "this afternoon" from us, done correct. And they were like "WTF, we were going to be charge thousands by Crosstalk for less!"
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@scottalanmiller - OK have to know ... what exactly happened? I thought he only sold FreePBX setups and how could he set that up costing $5K unless its the cost of phones that ran it up.
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@scottalanmiller said in Getting up and running with ER-X?:
@pmoncho a friend of one of our customers got hoodwinked by the Crosstalk guys! They sold him some piece of junk that was literally less than a free phone system and billed him $5,000 for the privilege of getting screwed.
From what I remember watching some of his videos he likes to use the PBXact appliances.
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@krzykat said in Getting up and running with ER-X?:
@scottalanmiller - OK have to know ... what exactly happened? I thought he only sold FreePBX setups and how could he set that up costing $5K unless its the cost of phones that ran it up.
Just a FreePBX setup on some non-business grade appliance hardware. No virtualization, no means of business support. The customer has an enterprise server, with enterprise virtualization, and enterprise backup all sitting right there and can mitigate downtime very, very well. Then they put their phones on some unserviceable hardware for some insane price tag.
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So this is SO weird, someone at Crosstalk slammed us with a "your account has been created" just hours after that thread! What the heck.
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@brianlittlejohn said in Getting up and running with ER-X?:
@scottalanmiller said in Getting up and running with ER-X?:
@pmoncho a friend of one of our customers got hoodwinked by the Crosstalk guys! They sold him some piece of junk that was literally less than a free phone system and billed him $5,000 for the privilege of getting screwed.
From what I remember watching some of his videos he likes to use the PBXact appliances.
Which aren't production level, they are consumer style devices. They aren't garbage, per se, but they don't leverage a minimum business class approach either in pricing or in hardware/dr.
The doctor I was working with (and I just mentioned this thread to him) had asked us about the solution and we mentioned that it was free to do on his existing hardware, and he admitted his buddy had been duped to drop $5K to have the same thing but without the availability of support and without the enterprise hardware for $5K. Totally nuts.
Appliances and phones do not go together. Phones are a trivial workload and their uptime almost always matters. So treating them like low importance items with an appliance is crazy. They've become one of those scams, much like most SAN deployments. Thirty years ago you couldn't get general purpose hardware that could run phones well and general purpose hardware wasn't very reliable, so people got used to paying a premium for phone hardware. Today, lots of vendors prey on people not realizing how phones work and not updating their thinking for the computer age. Big money in that.
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@scottalanmiller said in Getting up and running with ER-X?:
@pmoncho said in Getting up and running with ER-X?:
@JaredBusch said in Getting up and running with ER-X?:
@EddieJennings said in Getting up and running with ER-X?:
@pmoncho +1 to CrossTalk's videos. They're good.
I really dislike crosstalk. But this series is not by him, so probably good.
What is the issue with Crosstalk? (Peaked my interest)
Well, our experience is just from customers, but they basically sell free software, deployed poorly, for insane money.
We were pricing out something for a customer and it was like $200 and "this afternoon" from us, done correct. And they were like "WTF, we were going to be charge thousands by Crosstalk for less!"
Interesting to know. Will keep that in mind.
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@pmoncho said in Getting up and running with ER-X?:
@scottalanmiller said in Getting up and running with ER-X?:
@pmoncho said in Getting up and running with ER-X?:
@JaredBusch said in Getting up and running with ER-X?:
@EddieJennings said in Getting up and running with ER-X?:
@pmoncho +1 to CrossTalk's videos. They're good.
I really dislike crosstalk. But this series is not by him, so probably good.
What is the issue with Crosstalk? (Peaked my interest)
Well, our experience is just from customers, but they basically sell free software, deployed poorly, for insane money.
We were pricing out something for a customer and it was like $200 and "this afternoon" from us, done correct. And they were like "WTF, we were going to be charge thousands by Crosstalk for less!"
Interesting to know. Will keep that in mind.
It's not that they are terrible or something. Basically they are just a reseller of boxes and they apparently don't give advice or use production deployment methods because the money is in selling a $5000 physical PBX because customers are be easily tricked into buying a "box of unknown functionality" for a ton of money, but selling them software or services in that price range is extremely hard.
All the VARs and resellers focus on physical "boxes" because people are conditioned to not do proper cost analysis when doing so. It's a "magic box" and so the price tag means nothing to them. So Crosstalk appears to just follow the reseller trend of taking advantage of customers who are acting emotionally. Which is bad, but it can only happen to a customer who is totally asking for it. I wouldn't do it, obviously, but any customer who asks a reseller to tell them what to do has gone out of their way to set themselves up for this - asking the salesman how to give him money.
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@scottalanmiller I've never really liked that business model. I need my clients to be successful and grow their business. That's why we charge them very little to get up and running, usually just the hard cost of the phones, because then we charge them for the phone service, such that we get to have them as clients for years with a nice small return monthly over many years that will equal that 5K number or more. I'd guess his 5k box doesn't come with a ton of support and maintenance either?
