Are there different models of Edgerouter Lite?

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Earbanean

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Uber Geek
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#197990 21-Jun-2016 16:45

It seems when you see articles etc about ERLs, there are two different cases that are shown in the photos. One has square corners and the other has angled or beveled corners. Are these different models? If so, which is the more recent?

e.g.

Athsetics

3 posts

Wannabe Geek

#1577850 21-Jun-2016 19:12

Hi there.

Short answer : The Plastic case with beveled edges is the older ERLite and the Metal case is the newer one.

Longer answer :

They essentially have the same hardware but Ubiquiti updated the design of the ERLite to be more similar to the ERPoE when the ERPoE came out. The plastic one in its first revision sometimes had issues with internal storage dying.

Just note that they do run quite warm and the metal case is better than the plastic case in terms of thermals.

Lots of sites often don't update the product picture as the product model number didn't change, but they still sell the newer model but it might be best to check with the retailer in that case.

Aredwood

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#1578044 21-Jun-2016 23:40

My Edge router is one of the older plastic case ones. But it is installed vertically to help with cooling. Also it is running from a 12V UPS system, so it has been at least a year since it was powered down. Supposedly the internal storage is just a USB thumb drive. So you can download the firmware and create a new boot drive if needed. There was a thread on the Ubiquity forums about that.

fe31nz

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#1578052 22-Jun-2016 06:20

Aredwood:

Supposedly the internal storage is just a USB thumb drive. So you can download the firmware and create a new boot drive if needed. There was a thread on the Ubiquity forums about that.

Yes, the storage is just a small form factor USB stick - if you are replacing it yourself, you need to make sure you get one that is small enough to physically fit. There are several forum threads recommending replacements. After that, installing the software again is not too difficult. I did it a couple of times when my first ERL had a dodgy USB stick, using the forum thread explaining how to use the EdgeMax Rescue Kit. There is now a knowlegebase article about how to do it:

https://help.ubnt.com/hc/en-us/articles/204959514-EdgeMAX-Last-resort-recovery-of-failed-EdgeOS-device

When I got my second ERL, I sent the old one back under warranty and the whole thing was replaced with the newer metal case model. It seems that in the plastic case ones, they had a bad batch of USB sticks, so they had to replace quite a few of them. But there was no problem getting it done.

Do remember with ERLs that since the storage is a cheap USB stick, it is not designed for a high number of write cycles. So if you are playing around inside your ERL (eg running tshark to capture packets), remember to make anything that does writes do them to the ramdisk, not to the USB stick, or you can easily wear out the USB stick. The simplest place on the ramdisk to access is /var/log.

And on a different subject, it seems that there has just been a release of a new software update for the ERL, well ahead of when I was expecting one:

http://community.ubnt.com/t5/EdgeMAX-Updates-Blog/EdgeMAX-EdgeRouter-software-release-v1-8-5/ba-p/1591710

Earbanean

1110 posts

Uber Geek
+1 received by user: 377

#1578073 22-Jun-2016 08:07

Perfect, understood. Thanks for the clarifications.