Hands-On Engineering Podcasts · August 2026
The show is on hardware Wi-Fi controllers, which Salter notes cost about as much as one or two access points. He installs both brands at client sites, and his objection to the market leader is not price but what the gear degrades into once the controller is gone. He follows it with the first-generation CloudKey, whose non-journaling filesystem corrupted after about three unplanned power cuts in his testing.
Transcript
Precisely. And it's worth noting also that, you know, these hardware controllers are not at all expensive. The hardware Omada AP controller that I have at a school client of mine is currently running, I think, 140 or so access points. And that was the expensive Omada controller. And I want to say it cost like $200. The cheap ones like... 50.
Yeah, the cheap one is roughly the price of an access point, essentially.
And the expensive one is roughly the price of two access points. It's not a lot to get into. And I'm a big stickler for if I'm going to run hardware, especially this kind of hardware, it needs to be really, really rock-solid reliable. And one of the big things that got me angry with Ubiquiti way back was when they introduced the first generation CloudKey. You know, the thing was power over Ethernet powered. It had an SD card in it that was formatted with a non-journaling file system. And so you unplug this thing from the switch, you're just crashing it. And in my testing, you get maybe three of those before the file system gets corrupt. Or the non-journaling freaking database running on the non-journaling file system also gets corrupt. And now everything is just trashed. And you better hope that you've backed that up and you know how to restore it. And you're either going to need a new cloud key to restore it on, or you're going to need to get into some fairly deep wizardry to go in and reinstall everything on your corrupt cloud key. It sucks. So when I first started flirting with the Omada hardware controllers shortly after Ubiquiti introduced the CloudKey, the very first thing that I did with the very first one of those little $70 versions is I just crashed the power on it like non-stop. I spent like five minutes letting the thing boot up and unplugging it, letting it boot halfway up, unplugging it, on and on and on. And the thing never died. And I have seen the same kind of reliability out of all of these. And that to me is what makes it worthwhile to actually pay for the hardware controller when in the vast majority of my installations, I actually have a VM hosting appliance. And normally my approach absolutely would be just to start up a VM. Why wouldn't I? I already have hardware to do it. But when the hardware appliance is that inexpensive and that robust and reliable, hell yeah, just give me the hardware. The last thing I want to mention before we close this out is as much as I've been pitching the joys of completely local and on-premise control, if you want the cloud stuff, Omada can do that as well. It's just an option, not something that you're forced into. And even the controllers themselves are optional, I'd like to point out, because all of the features of the Omada access points are fully accessible when they're run individually as standalone devices, each with its own fully functional web interface. By comparison, modern Ubiquiti access points, while they do have a standalone mode, they are dumber than the absolute stupidest Linksys router from the year 2000 if they're running standalone mode without the controller.
Right. Well, we better get out of here then. Remember, show at 2.5admins.com if you want to send any questions or your feedback. You can find me at joeress.com slash mastodon.
You can find me at mercenary sysadmin.com.
And alanjude.com for me.