Lee Hutchinson
This morning, I’d like to pour one out for a really superior piece of gear that did every thing I requested of it with out criticism and died earlier than its time: my Unifi 8-port POE switch, mannequin US-8-150W. Farewell, pricey switch. You had been an actual one, and a lightning strike took you from us too quickly.
I picked up this switch again in January 2016 after I was ramping up my quest to change my shaky house Wi-Fi with one thing a bit extra enterprise-y. The outcomes had been, on the entire, optimistic (you possibly can examine how that quest turned out on this piece proper right here, which accommodates a lot reflection on the implications—good and unhealthy—of going overboard on house networking), and this little 8-port switch proved to be a serious enabler of the design I settled on.
Why? Well, it is a good sufficient system—having 802.3af/at and Ubiquiti’s 24-volt passive PoE possibility made it universally suitable with absolutely anything I wished to hook up to it. But the important thing function was the 2 SFP slots, which technically make this a 10-port switch. I’ve a indifferent storage, and I wished to hook up some PoE-powered safety cameras on the market, together with an extra wi-fi entry level. The easiest answer would have been to run Ethernet between the home and the storage, however that is not truly a easy answer in any respect—working Ethernet underground between two buildings could be electrically problematic until it is executed by professionals with skilled instruments, and I’m positively not an expert. A pair of estimates from native firms instructed me that trenching conduit between my home and the storage was going to price a number of hundred {dollars}, which was greater than I wished to spend.
But optical fiber would not have any of {the electrical} points that copper does, and it really works nice between buildings. All it took to wire up my storage had been some low-cost gigabit SFP transceivers (fairly positive I used these ones proper right here), 40 meters of aqua-clad multimode fiber, and a $75 appointment with a contractor to truly run the fiber. Then I simply had to mount the switch, and, increase, the storage was formally half of the community.
Lee Hutchinson
The motive why this switch warrants a front-page write-up is the sheer aplomb with which it dealt with the ridiculous quantity of heat-related abuse it had to put up with. During the summer time—which in Houston lasts about 10 months out of the 12 months—the storage temperature can get above 120°F (round 50°C) and keep that approach for 10 or 12 hours, and the US-8-150W’s CPU thermal sensor spent most of its operational life studying between 70°–80°C. That little switch ate these temperatures each single day, with out criticism, for nearly eight years.
That’s fairly rattling good, in my opinion. In reality, the switch would nonetheless be in place, fortunately doing its factor, if not for a lightning strike close to my house a pair of months again. The strike precipitated a bunch of issues—and one of these issues was scrambling the switch’s brains.
And even after the strike, the switch nonetheless would not die. Two ports stop working altogether, and two others would not produce PoE anymore, however the US-8-150W soldiered on for one more month whereas I hunted round for a alternative.
In the tip, the one factor I might discover to change the US-8-150W ended up being one other US-8-150W—and so that is what now hangs in my storage, in the identical place as its forebear. Kudos to Ubiquiti for producing this tank—no matter else the corporate might have executed, good or unhealthy, the US-8-150W was a hell of a switch. Here’s to it, and this is to the US-8-150W that I’m changing it with. If I can get one other eight years out of this one, it’s going to completely be cash effectively spent.