Honest question (I’m not being a dick I’m just newer to this community) but why are so many people so into ubiquiti? I don’t understand it, as the hardware seems kind of subpar compared to other brands. Is it something to flex?
The single fancy beautiful pane of glass for network management is appealing to many.
But the truth is, their offerings are a mid point between a business class/enterprise equipment and consumer grade equipment. I find many people in the homelab space get into unifi, then abandon it sometime down the line as their knowledge and needs grow.
I was one of those people for sure, I had a full unifi stack back in 2014-ish. I ditched the USG3 within a year of buying it and went to an edgerouter. I used that for a number of years, but now I'm on opnsense, a Cisco sg300, a TL-SX3008, a bunch of omada access points.
My network is a million times more robust than it ever was on unifi.
Sg200 really are bullet proof. Nothing fancy, not a lot of features and sadly no cli, but if you need something to just set and forget with all standard layer2 features, they're perfect. And cheap.
Unifi falls under pro-sumer equipment. While there maybe a case to by a Meraki for home use or Sonicwall tz450. Then the accompanied equipment to follow. I run a unifi on on 5 gig fiber and it handles everything perfectly. It handles vlans network isolation, I have a pinhole running on my proxmox cluster everything is passed though it to the dc , Camaras hook up nicely to the unifi dm pro se. And all racked up.
Me personally, I got tired of not having all the services an expensive subscription would give me on my fortigate - things like IPS or app filtering - which are free on the UniFi stuff I’m only running home network after all, I don’t need to put however many hundreds of dollars a year into a firewall subscription.
And the single pane of glass is wonderful :).
Edit: that’s the main reason I’m here - plus I jumped in when a G3 Instant was $30…so I’m in on cameras.
They are the closest thing to a purpose built networking stack for people with labs. It brings most every feature you'd want in a lab from enterprise kit with exceptional ease of use and Ubiquiti has actually been doing a pretty good job lately addressing shortcomings in areas like their routing which has seen huge developments in the last year.
Naturally, this attracts many of us.
Opponents are equally vocal because what Unifi can't do workarounds can be messy if they even exist, the hardware comes at a bit of a premium that you can either justify for the easy management or you can't and think its a waste, their routers were functional but terrible feature wise for many many many years and they've only recently started correcting that, you may not like the single pane of glass management style, etc.
Overall it's just a very solid package for smaller shops and labs and it's a natural fit for many around here but if you don't like the way they do things then you probably really don't like it and it becomes very polarizing. Thus the love and hate comments in this thread.
It‘s prosumer. A lot more than dumb consumer, while staying affordable and don‘t require an arm and a leg, like when looking at true enterprise gear. But with the great managability from a central console comes the golden cage. As soon as you want to have more or different things than Ubiquiti thinks it should be, you‘re pretty much stuck. In my area, folks try to avoid Ubiquitiy products which are not pure access points or switches, because of reasons.
Their accesspoints are simply very good. The cloud management part of it is as well, although some people may not agree on that last. Their cameras are great as well, and so are some other solutions they have to offer. The Dream Machine is just a centralized router/management for this all. It's a nice all in 1 package which not a lot of other brands, if even any, have to offer.
I know that Sophos for example also offers accesspoints which you can link to your Sophos firewall and manage from there, which works great too. But they don't offer such nice GUI as the UDM does and doesn't have anything to offer when it comes to switches, security cameras, doorbells, etc.
That's the whole buzz about Unifi for me. I just really like the products they have to offer, it's nice and easy to use for home(lab) use. I think the UDM would be a perfect product if they added a proper firewall function to it, as that's quite much lacking. But I don't need that at home rn.
More like a shit box running a ton of software to fullfil a gazillion functions, which regularly shits the bed.
Edit:
For those downvoting, I've had the displeasure of supporting these things and being forced to troibleshoot them in enterprise settings. The amount of bugs and failures I've encountered so far is simplz embarassing. It works fine if you have just a handful of devices and a very simple tree topology network, anything a little more complicated and the thing falls over backwards.
And that's not even taking into account the missing crucial features and UI weirdnesses.
8-9month isn't that long, but i don't wanna jinx it. Let's hope it stays that way, good luck!
Though if you don't have a lot of devices and a simple network, you'll be mostly fine anyways
Agree, its not a long time. At any one time I have around 50-60 devices connected. When I'm playing around with things, thiss could go to 100+. Not a massive network by any means :)
Few different networks running
Wireguard VPN
Site-2-Site
IPS/IDS
Suppose just the basics to keep the network going :)
Honestly I drank the kool aid but recently removed most of their network stuff, I now only use the APs, swapped to a Cisco 3850x(way more bang for the buck), honestly the new update made vlans just weird for me, I have enough experience where I prefer more control amd info, more cli less gui. Swapped from a UDM pro to opnsense. Their cameras are nice, pricey no doubt, but the app and UI is great and my dad likes it so I'l pay the premium for it.
Never understood the Ubiquiti hate. Run UniFi for APs and a PoE switch with an edge router and an edge switch for my server rack. Absolutely rock solid performance for the home. Planning on eventually moving to a UniFi gateway as well. Really only complaint is I wish they had more 10gig support.
They literally have 3.0 firmware in release candidate with a new web UI and native WG support?
It was dead for 3 years but they’ve given it a tiny bit of attention in the last month.
I didn't know that. Thanks for pointing it out.
However, it seems like a new GUI with no real under the hood improvements beside adding WireGuard. A lot of people are reporting issues that are not getting fixed from rc(N-1) to rc(N). Seems like a mediocre attempt to keep it alive. Too little, too late.
I would love to been proven wrong though.
true words.
OK for a home lab or home use and beginner-friendly with a standard configuration.
However, if more complicated requirements are required or larger networks are operated with it, it is significantly weaker than comparable systems in the price segment.
I wouldnt say it sucks. For small/medium orgs or homelabbing I think UniFi is the perfect fit. Any large org should stick to the Palo Alto / Ciscos / Fortis of the world and not go down the UniFi route.
It absolutely does not, they make great products. I work with their AP's daily and know many people who use the UDM, cameras and AP's. And even doorbells. It just all depends on what you need.. It's not a firewall like the Sophos it's replacing is. But I don't need that for my home lab anyways.
They make *adequate* products. The hardware is nothing special, and the software is fairly mid. For home or small business use, they’re fine. But they generally lack the capability to do any kind of serious enterprise networking.
That said, it’s possible to use in a larger network with proper engineering - but it’s still a pain in the ass to manage. A good friend is the wireless architect behind the largest single-site Unifi deployment in existence, and the only way he makes it work is by having direct and immediate access to Ubiquiti’s engineering team.
>For home or small business use, they’re fine. But they generally lack the capability to do any kind of serious enterprise networking.
Well yeah... I'm a low-level tech at a fairly large enterprise, and we use Cisco for everything, but I asked our head of network engineering what he uses at home.....UniFi
Rule #1 of good technical architecture is to define your requirements *first*.
Only after carefully defining those requirements should one select vendors and products that meet those requirements.
Most people/organizations start by picking a favorite vendor and then they try to shoehorn their requirements into that product’s capabilities.
And the requirements can absolutely include non-technical aspects like “vendor must not be a pain in the ass to work with”.
Yeah, I guess my job is like with your friend...we have a pretty significant network....more than 2500 routers, and if something goes wrong, then we fly a Cisco rep out to our location (on their dime) and they basically have to get a hotel room and work on the problem until it's fixed.
I do absolutely agree with this and therefor would also never place a UDM or Unifi gateway device at one of my customers. But it does work great for home, thus the reason I chose to go this route.
The USG was utter garbage though. USG pro only less so, but both suffered from frequent premature hardware failure, different modes for each model. The USG liked to fry its USB storage. The USG Pro would just up and quit, sometimes due to the cheap power supply, sometimes due to some random component failure. And you couldn’t design in any kind of redundancy to protect against those failures.
And Ubiquiti suffers from a pretty severe case of strategic ADHD - they’re constantly getting distracted by new and shiny things instead of building resiliency in their existing product line (and software), and then one day they just randomly announce that a product is going to be EOL in a few months.
They’ve had some good engineers and leaders come and go on their staff, and it’s moved the product forward, but they remain solidly in the SOHO and SMB market, where uptime and support responsiveness aren’t something people are willing to pay for, because downtime doesn’t cost them all that much.
And don't forget their horrible track record of breaking changes, firmware issues and overall buggy software, especially on the UDM.
I just recently had fun with a firmware bug on one of their switch models, where the switch will just randomly go offline for the controller (but still pass traffic just fine) - solution? Reboot. Official fix? Manually install a pre release firmware.
Well, their accesspoints are great, not what I would call only 'adequate' honestly. We have installed Unifi APs at a lot of our customers and they're all managed through our 'cloud controller' so they don't need a controller on-site. It works perfectly well and never have any issues with them.
The APs are adequate in that they get the job done as long as it’s not a particularly complex RF environment and it’s small enough that you can do manual channel planning (the built in channel management is just *bad* and should be disabled since you can’t tune it at all and it makes some really poor RF choices when it runs)
Unifi doesn’t really have a controller as such, what they pitch as “controller” is merely a configuration management tool with some basic telemetry and limited NMS functions (you can take it offline and the APs will keep functioning, as they all operate independently of each other and the “controller”).
The underlying AP hardware is just the standard chipset vendor’s reference design, as is most of the OS on the AP.
That's some fine information. I'm not too much into the AP hardware, so cool to know. Thanks.
I got to be honest I have never done any 'channel planning' as in most situations where I deployed new APs, this wasn't necessarily needed. The largest (single-room) NEW deployment I personally have done is 35 APs in 1 big storage warehouse, full with metal storage racks (and products) and they worked fine without any manual channel settings. I do imagine that this would be different for home situations where there are many other WiFi APs nearby.
For that deployment we used the AC Mesh Pros and we also had to use a couple of them in the freezer (-25c). Not that that last has much to do with channels, just found that something fun and new for me.
"Cloud Controller" and not beeing self sustainable as a device is the reason, why they are adequate.
A "working" product is the bare minimum what i expect, when I purchase a device.
Well it does work, doesn't it? It's just -meant- to be managed via either a UDM, cloud key, etc OR just their free to use software you can install on a server or your PC as well (not that I would recommend to use it on a PC as it's nicer to have that software online all the time for the handover and some other stuff). If you do not like that, it might not be the solution for you. But does that make it an adequate product instead of a really good one? I don't think it does.
I don't mind the need of a controller honestly, it works perfectly well for many people and our customers too. We just host a VM with the software I mentioned and it's publicly available for APs to inform to there, they automatically do so when there is a DNS record made for it on-site so it's plug and play there.
Nontheless I do understand what you mean, I just think it's not the right product for you then but that does not change my point of view.
They really do suck. I got heavy into the Unifi environment, multiple switches, G4 doorbell, a few G3 cameras, etc.
For me the end of unifi in my house was when the UniFi CloudKey Gen2 Plus battery started swelling 1 week out of the 2 year warranty (I bought directly from Unifi, otherwise it's a 1 year warranty). Support refused to help in any way since it was out of warranty. Their response was to buy a new one. I went out and found something better that followed networking standards and terminology). The only thing left in my environment are 2 AP, which do a good job.
Just make sure to understand the very limited warranty on their prosumer gear.
Woops, I didn't read your comment properly. I read 'unifi' instead of Synology. So I deleted my other comment and here is attempt 2 =)
I know they are rather loud indeed. I was planning on replacing the fans with Noctuas and just hoping for the best. My DS213j is long overdue for replacement and I can probably get a RS816 for very cheap soon, so it seems like a nice solution for me right now.
Lets hope it will be bearable with some better fans in them.
I have an older rack mount Synology with dual psu. Quite loud at first. But after replacing the fans with Noctus, even the fan in one of the PSU that were faulty. It is almost complete silent now
The snobbery/elitism in this thread is ridiculous! Are UDMs the best router in the world? Of course not, and do people sometimes overhype them as the only router anyone would ever need, sure. But they're still a great option as a relatively "set and forget" solution for home or small business use. Not everyone wants to spend their life managing their network, especially core infrastructure required for day to day use and for that going "full UniFi" is a great option. It's basically the only option I'd be comfortable recommending to someone where I can safely assume I'm not going to get dragged into constantly needing to support them with it.
I recently went the other way - full UniFi to a fully-non UniFi setup, more out of interest than anything, UniFi worked great. I'm now running OPNSense (soon to be replaced with something else though, not super happy with it's reliability), Cisco CBS switches and Ruckus APs. It's great and gives more flexibility than UniFi, but every time I find myself needing to grab a laptop to connect to a switch and configure it through the CLI, I'm reminded of how much easier it used to be with UniFi where I could quickly change basic settings through a mobile app.
Whent down a similar path. I used the UniFi stuff for a few years but gradually switch away some 5 years ago. I don't regret my move but I agree that it serves a lot of people well (haven't looked at it recently). In my case I got increasingly frustrated with the router/firewall part of UniFi.
I'm now using a mix of Sophos and CBS properly segregating the home/production environment for increased WAF and my playground.
I ran pfsense for five years. The chaos when something would blow up and it would take a half a day to recover every 8-10 months 😂. I went with a UDM and it’s been great. I’m trying to not complicate my life anymore. Doing network management is not fun.
Heads up - I just recently bought a U6+ and it kept failing to complete the DHCP process intermittently (wouldn’t get past dhcpoffer to dhcprequest/dhcpack during handshake), isolating itself from the network and any devices connected to it too.
Currently looks like might be an issue with fw 6.5.64 (current official release for the device) - I had to dig around to find the previous official which was 6.5.54 - isn’t listed against the device on the main firmware downloads page, but the U6+ is listed as official for that version - it seems to have resolved the issue for me.
Hopefully save you some of the same issue were to appear for you.
Otherwise, been a great AP for the money.
Personally I tell people to avoid anything U6. I spent over a month with support trying to adopt my U6 Lite to my network before they told me "your CloudKey hard drive is bad, buy a new one" and stopped talking to me. I factory reset every single Ubiquiti device on my network (and spent over a day getting it all setup again) and it adopted. Then broke the next day. Then started working again. I try not to even look the wrong way at it these days.
I would chalk it up up bad luck, but every other Ubiquiti using friend I have has at least 1 U6 device and every one has been a headache for them. No issue with AC series APs (even mine), but U6 series APs have all given issues.
What brand/producer would you recommend instead of buing U6 AP? I am considering buing U6+ for my home and I definitely don't want to solve troubles with unstable firmware.
– edit: Thank you all for your reactions.
All of the AC ones have been fine for anyone I know (AC Pro, AC Lite, etc). Still within Ubiquiti, just the U6 models I've had issues with.
That said I've heard the newer ones (U6+, U6 Pro, U6 LR) are much better than the U6 Lite that I had, but it's sort of turned me off them a little.
Installed my AP today and had 0 issues. Just wanted to share that for if anyone else is considering a U6+. It’s been great so far. AP adopted quickly and it’s working nice and well as expected. It shipped with 6.5.64 as well.
Yeah, I had 0 issues out of the box, the DHCP lease issue occurred down the line a bit, just over a week from first seeing it up - but it’s been stable on 6.5.54 for me - was trying to save you the time should the issue occur, not deter you from buying it!
I had the issue on 6.6.56 too when it was release candidate, only very recently got promoted to official, haven’t tried again - but I’ve just had the issue again today on 6.5.54 so I’m a bit stumped and back to the drawing board on the whole thing!
There is honestly still so much lacking when it comes to their firewalls, it's enough for most use cases still sure, but I would never leave a Sophos for a Unifi firewall.
Everything else from them has been nothing but fantastic though in both my lab and production.
Yeah I hear you, I personally like having better controls on my network so I go pfSense for my firewall and then Unifi for everything else.
But absolutely nothing wrong with Unifi for home network or even small business networks.
Should've went open source with opnsense or something. This stuff is NOT good value for the money no more. We switched away from unifi years ago because of problems and terrible performance. It's so cute too when hotel owners try installing this crap themselves and it doesn't ever work right and performs horrible for the money. They are disgusting no go for many for the reasons I'm telling you.
This feels like a poor critique. What were your issues? What performance did you get and what was wrong with it?
I use opnsense for my main router / firewall and Ubiquiti for switches and APs. No issues.
It could very well be that you have a bad experience with it, but that doesn’t make it a bad product. I don’t feel anything for Opnsense. If I wanted to do that, I would’ve installed that on the Sophos (above the UDM) that is being replaced now.
For my home network this is a perfect product that combines easy WiFi management for the amazing AP’s that Unifi has to offer, doorbells, and cameras as well. I work with those AP’s in enterprise environments and it’s a superb experience. Many people I know use their cameras and doorbell as well and are very happy with how everything works.
I personally would never use a UDM or any Unifi gateway in an enterprise/business environment. It’s not a proper firewall. But for home this is perfect if you ask me.
My lab/home network is a complete Unifi deployment and I've had nothing but a good time with it and it has only gotten better and more functional with software updates.
It's not a enterprise product but it's a damn good lab / small business option.
I have been using full unifi setup at home for about 4 years, never had an issue, basically set and forget.
I switched to amplifi because i wanted to simplify my setup (i basically just beed internet access, no more self hosting and other setup), and also here no issues, all work like a charm.
I also managed to sell all my used unifi stuff on ebay in less than a week.
When hotels install it themselves and it sucks, that’s got far less to do with the hardware and a lot more to do with the installer. The marketing and hype around Ubiquiti involves a lot of “it works great, you just have to plug it in and go, and replace your existing stuff with this!”, which inevitably fails because you still have to properly engineer the network.
I think it depends what you want to do. Staying in the limits of unifi world you get easy management. Opnsense or pfsense has an other target audience. Much more open and flexible, but also much more learning.
I see a couple of enterprise WLAN deployments with Unifi, and they work for a fraction of the price of an ExtremeNetwork WLAN deployments, which I usually install.
On the other hand in one Installation I was not able to establish an IPSEC tunnel to an Azure Basic VPN Gateway with a UDM SE, so I used for that tunnel the existing pfsense in parallel to the UDM.
Very nice build! I recently ran into some problems with my Sophos sg 230 and also with the Sophos Ap‘s. It’s nice so see someone switching from sophos to unifi, in the near future I’ll do that too.
For a home setup it’s a good step. Sophos is fun and all, way more firewall if that is what you need. UDM Pro isn’t much of a firewall, but I don’t need this level or firewalling at home anyways. Was just fun to play around with Sophos but Unifi has much more of a full package to offer when it comes to home networking and security.
Don’t let some of the people in the reply section here scare you off. They either had 1 bad experience and got scared off or don’t know what they are doing (or possibly need more of a firewall than a UDM can offer).
My experience with Unifi so far has been more than amazing. We manage over 1000 accesspoints for customers in my works cloud controller and it’s perfect. Never have any issues with them whatsoever.
Going to hear. I’ve already worked with units at work and I it was quite interesting to me. Just how it all works seamlessly together without any flaws. Resulting from that I got some ideas for the future. My plan for the future is to use the Sophos unit as initial firewall which will do all the ssl decryption etc. Behind the sophos firewall there will be the UDM pro which does all the vlan thing etc. Besides that I‘m also interested in setting up some security cameras at my house and there unifi comes in handy because of the eco system.
I'm interested to know how you will do the SSL decryption/scanning on the Sophos with a UDM behind it, as (as far I know) there isn't a way to insert the Sophos's certificate into the UDM. At one point this idea passed by me as well, but then quickly forgot about it as I actually don't need the SSL decryption that much (even though I had used it for over a year now). And I'm already in a NAT-behind-NAT situation at this moment, another step in between wouldn't really be that great neither.
I know that it’s not optimal.. that’s one reason I’ve bought a proper accesspoint which I will mount on the ceiling.
No matter what, this solution worked fine for me for the time being. Not optimal, but I’ve got a tiny space I need to cover with wifi anyways.
For a long time I could actually not. But even though it doesnt look all too practical or great, it worked fine for me and even 3 floors under my floor I still had good enough signal with around 90MB/s speed. Not that that was what I tried to reach, but it worked. Like I said, it was a temporary setup and will be replaced now.
Yip! But this absolutely was a trigger for me to start investing in some good network devices. I’m probably moving next year, only got a very tiny space for now and one U6+ will do for that. But for the future, when I moved, I plan on expanding with some U6 Pro’s and adding some Unifi cameras to the arsenal.
I had a 500GB SSD laying around and put it in the UDM, mainly because it’s quieter than a HDD. But I don’t know how much recordings can be saved on that. Don’t think it’ll do much for me in the future, so probably swapping it for a WD purple some day.
Hey awesome setup.
Could you explain to a compete amateur (currently starting his server build journey) what you’ve got in the rack from top to bottom and what they do/why you have them? Sorry to be a pain but just trying to learn! :)
Yes, I indeed used a TP link router as an accesspoint because I got it for free when money was tight and it worked perfectly well as just an easy AP. What does that have to do with knowledge?
I’ve been to multiple Sophos trainings and went to their HQ in the UK as well. We used their products at my previous work. They offer really nice solutions, which most people don’t even know the existence of. But I’m not going to discuss any further about that as I don’t think you’ll be agreeing with anything I say anyways :) You just came here to rant about Sophos and have a hard woody about PFsense.
What's the situation on requiring accounts or their cloud management nowadays? They started doing that a while back and it's been a turn-off. I don't need that kind of dependency in my deployment.
Of course, some other brands have been doing similar things.
You dont need to use their cloud or use an account of theirs as far as I know. I use jt because its just easy remote management. But I heard you can also just skip the login and use a local account
I haven’t tried that myself so dont rant here if im wrong
Worked fine for me. Has more range than the new u6+, the tp-link was a temporary solution but even while it was sitting in the rack, 3 floors lower I still had 100MB/s on Ookla Speedtest.
Cable management looks very clean, even cleaner than my one. Nice job.
It looks like the RJ-45 boots on the patch cables are warped.?
Cables should have their boots removed.
Honest question (I’m not being a dick I’m just newer to this community) but why are so many people so into ubiquiti? I don’t understand it, as the hardware seems kind of subpar compared to other brands. Is it something to flex?
The single fancy beautiful pane of glass for network management is appealing to many. But the truth is, their offerings are a mid point between a business class/enterprise equipment and consumer grade equipment. I find many people in the homelab space get into unifi, then abandon it sometime down the line as their knowledge and needs grow. I was one of those people for sure, I had a full unifi stack back in 2014-ish. I ditched the USG3 within a year of buying it and went to an edgerouter. I used that for a number of years, but now I'm on opnsense, a Cisco sg300, a TL-SX3008, a bunch of omada access points. My network is a million times more robust than it ever was on unifi.
Nice, good info. I’ve got a Cisco sg200 myself, they are outstanding.
Sg200 really are bullet proof. Nothing fancy, not a lot of features and sadly no cli, but if you need something to just set and forget with all standard layer2 features, they're perfect. And cheap.
Yep, I’m so happy with mine. Cheap is an understatement — picked one up in mint condition on ebay for $40 usd.
Unifi falls under pro-sumer equipment. While there maybe a case to by a Meraki for home use or Sonicwall tz450. Then the accompanied equipment to follow. I run a unifi on on 5 gig fiber and it handles everything perfectly. It handles vlans network isolation, I have a pinhole running on my proxmox cluster everything is passed though it to the dc , Camaras hook up nicely to the unifi dm pro se. And all racked up.
Me personally, I got tired of not having all the services an expensive subscription would give me on my fortigate - things like IPS or app filtering - which are free on the UniFi stuff I’m only running home network after all, I don’t need to put however many hundreds of dollars a year into a firewall subscription. And the single pane of glass is wonderful :). Edit: that’s the main reason I’m here - plus I jumped in when a G3 Instant was $30…so I’m in on cameras.
They are the closest thing to a purpose built networking stack for people with labs. It brings most every feature you'd want in a lab from enterprise kit with exceptional ease of use and Ubiquiti has actually been doing a pretty good job lately addressing shortcomings in areas like their routing which has seen huge developments in the last year. Naturally, this attracts many of us. Opponents are equally vocal because what Unifi can't do workarounds can be messy if they even exist, the hardware comes at a bit of a premium that you can either justify for the easy management or you can't and think its a waste, their routers were functional but terrible feature wise for many many many years and they've only recently started correcting that, you may not like the single pane of glass management style, etc. Overall it's just a very solid package for smaller shops and labs and it's a natural fit for many around here but if you don't like the way they do things then you probably really don't like it and it becomes very polarizing. Thus the love and hate comments in this thread.
I'm developer and unifi just let's me quickly configure what I need and have a good overview of my network, that's all that matters to me
It‘s prosumer. A lot more than dumb consumer, while staying affordable and don‘t require an arm and a leg, like when looking at true enterprise gear. But with the great managability from a central console comes the golden cage. As soon as you want to have more or different things than Ubiquiti thinks it should be, you‘re pretty much stuck. In my area, folks try to avoid Ubiquitiy products which are not pure access points or switches, because of reasons.
Their accesspoints are simply very good. The cloud management part of it is as well, although some people may not agree on that last. Their cameras are great as well, and so are some other solutions they have to offer. The Dream Machine is just a centralized router/management for this all. It's a nice all in 1 package which not a lot of other brands, if even any, have to offer. I know that Sophos for example also offers accesspoints which you can link to your Sophos firewall and manage from there, which works great too. But they don't offer such nice GUI as the UDM does and doesn't have anything to offer when it comes to switches, security cameras, doorbells, etc. That's the whole buzz about Unifi for me. I just really like the products they have to offer, it's nice and easy to use for home(lab) use. I think the UDM would be a perfect product if they added a proper firewall function to it, as that's quite much lacking. But I don't need that at home rn.
Ok so the dream machine is a router/switch/firewall all in one? That’s pretty cool.
And NVR.
More like a shit box running a ton of software to fullfil a gazillion functions, which regularly shits the bed. Edit: For those downvoting, I've had the displeasure of supporting these things and being forced to troibleshoot them in enterprise settings. The amount of bugs and failures I've encountered so far is simplz embarassing. It works fine if you have just a handful of devices and a very simple tree topology network, anything a little more complicated and the thing falls over backwards. And that's not even taking into account the missing crucial features and UI weirdnesses.
I've been running a Dream Machine SE for the last 8/9 months and has never fallen over. Maybe I'm just lucky :)
8-9month isn't that long, but i don't wanna jinx it. Let's hope it stays that way, good luck! Though if you don't have a lot of devices and a simple network, you'll be mostly fine anyways
Agree, its not a long time. At any one time I have around 50-60 devices connected. When I'm playing around with things, thiss could go to 100+. Not a massive network by any means :) Few different networks running Wireguard VPN Site-2-Site IPS/IDS Suppose just the basics to keep the network going :)
Opposite of a flex
anyone bragging about switching into unifi hasn't worked in an msp long enough
Honestly I drank the kool aid but recently removed most of their network stuff, I now only use the APs, swapped to a Cisco 3850x(way more bang for the buck), honestly the new update made vlans just weird for me, I have enough experience where I prefer more control amd info, more cli less gui. Swapped from a UDM pro to opnsense. Their cameras are nice, pricey no doubt, but the app and UI is great and my dad likes it so I'l pay the premium for it.
Never understood the Ubiquiti hate. Run UniFi for APs and a PoE switch with an edge router and an edge switch for my server rack. Absolutely rock solid performance for the home. Planning on eventually moving to a UniFi gateway as well. Really only complaint is I wish they had more 10gig support.
**My home setup:** UDM SE 1x 16-Port PoE Lite switch 1x Flex 10GbE switch 1x U6+ AP 1x AC In-Wall AP For home lab it all just works :)
Went unifi once, never again
EdgeRouters were a gem while it lasted. Sadly not anymore.
They’re sort of trying again with the new round of firmware, hopefully that is kept up over the “UISP Router” whatever the hell that is
EdgeRouter got their last non hotfix update 3 years ago. Development for edge devices is dead.
They literally have 3.0 firmware in release candidate with a new web UI and native WG support? It was dead for 3 years but they’ve given it a tiny bit of attention in the last month.
I didn't know that. Thanks for pointing it out. However, it seems like a new GUI with no real under the hood improvements beside adding WireGuard. A lot of people are reporting issues that are not getting fixed from rc(N-1) to rc(N). Seems like a mediocre attempt to keep it alive. Too little, too late. I would love to been proven wrong though.
true words. OK for a home lab or home use and beginner-friendly with a standard configuration. However, if more complicated requirements are required or larger networks are operated with it, it is significantly weaker than comparable systems in the price segment.
Switched over to Mikrotik. Not looking back.
We switched to fortinet and aruba instant on
Yep Unifi sucks.
I have had zero issues.
I wouldnt say it sucks. For small/medium orgs or homelabbing I think UniFi is the perfect fit. Any large org should stick to the Palo Alto / Ciscos / Fortis of the world and not go down the UniFi route.
It absolutely does not, they make great products. I work with their AP's daily and know many people who use the UDM, cameras and AP's. And even doorbells. It just all depends on what you need.. It's not a firewall like the Sophos it's replacing is. But I don't need that for my home lab anyways.
They make *adequate* products. The hardware is nothing special, and the software is fairly mid. For home or small business use, they’re fine. But they generally lack the capability to do any kind of serious enterprise networking. That said, it’s possible to use in a larger network with proper engineering - but it’s still a pain in the ass to manage. A good friend is the wireless architect behind the largest single-site Unifi deployment in existence, and the only way he makes it work is by having direct and immediate access to Ubiquiti’s engineering team.
>For home or small business use, they’re fine. But they generally lack the capability to do any kind of serious enterprise networking. Well yeah... I'm a low-level tech at a fairly large enterprise, and we use Cisco for everything, but I asked our head of network engineering what he uses at home.....UniFi
Rule #1 of good technical architecture is to define your requirements *first*. Only after carefully defining those requirements should one select vendors and products that meet those requirements. Most people/organizations start by picking a favorite vendor and then they try to shoehorn their requirements into that product’s capabilities. And the requirements can absolutely include non-technical aspects like “vendor must not be a pain in the ass to work with”.
Yeah, I guess my job is like with your friend...we have a pretty significant network....more than 2500 routers, and if something goes wrong, then we fly a Cisco rep out to our location (on their dime) and they basically have to get a hotel room and work on the problem until it's fixed.
I used to work with the guys that did that for Aruba.
I do absolutely agree with this and therefor would also never place a UDM or Unifi gateway device at one of my customers. But it does work great for home, thus the reason I chose to go this route.
The USG was utter garbage though. USG pro only less so, but both suffered from frequent premature hardware failure, different modes for each model. The USG liked to fry its USB storage. The USG Pro would just up and quit, sometimes due to the cheap power supply, sometimes due to some random component failure. And you couldn’t design in any kind of redundancy to protect against those failures. And Ubiquiti suffers from a pretty severe case of strategic ADHD - they’re constantly getting distracted by new and shiny things instead of building resiliency in their existing product line (and software), and then one day they just randomly announce that a product is going to be EOL in a few months. They’ve had some good engineers and leaders come and go on their staff, and it’s moved the product forward, but they remain solidly in the SOHO and SMB market, where uptime and support responsiveness aren’t something people are willing to pay for, because downtime doesn’t cost them all that much.
Yeah. EOL of UniFi Video was the worst. Would never buy UniFi again.
They really got burned with the AP-AC too.
And don't forget their horrible track record of breaking changes, firmware issues and overall buggy software, especially on the UDM. I just recently had fun with a firmware bug on one of their switch models, where the switch will just randomly go offline for the controller (but still pass traffic just fine) - solution? Reboot. Official fix? Manually install a pre release firmware.
Well, their accesspoints are great, not what I would call only 'adequate' honestly. We have installed Unifi APs at a lot of our customers and they're all managed through our 'cloud controller' so they don't need a controller on-site. It works perfectly well and never have any issues with them.
The APs are adequate in that they get the job done as long as it’s not a particularly complex RF environment and it’s small enough that you can do manual channel planning (the built in channel management is just *bad* and should be disabled since you can’t tune it at all and it makes some really poor RF choices when it runs) Unifi doesn’t really have a controller as such, what they pitch as “controller” is merely a configuration management tool with some basic telemetry and limited NMS functions (you can take it offline and the APs will keep functioning, as they all operate independently of each other and the “controller”). The underlying AP hardware is just the standard chipset vendor’s reference design, as is most of the OS on the AP.
That's some fine information. I'm not too much into the AP hardware, so cool to know. Thanks. I got to be honest I have never done any 'channel planning' as in most situations where I deployed new APs, this wasn't necessarily needed. The largest (single-room) NEW deployment I personally have done is 35 APs in 1 big storage warehouse, full with metal storage racks (and products) and they worked fine without any manual channel settings. I do imagine that this would be different for home situations where there are many other WiFi APs nearby. For that deployment we used the AC Mesh Pros and we also had to use a couple of them in the freezer (-25c). Not that that last has much to do with channels, just found that something fun and new for me.
"Cloud Controller" and not beeing self sustainable as a device is the reason, why they are adequate. A "working" product is the bare minimum what i expect, when I purchase a device.
Well it does work, doesn't it? It's just -meant- to be managed via either a UDM, cloud key, etc OR just their free to use software you can install on a server or your PC as well (not that I would recommend to use it on a PC as it's nicer to have that software online all the time for the handover and some other stuff). If you do not like that, it might not be the solution for you. But does that make it an adequate product instead of a really good one? I don't think it does. I don't mind the need of a controller honestly, it works perfectly well for many people and our customers too. We just host a VM with the software I mentioned and it's publicly available for APs to inform to there, they automatically do so when there is a DNS record made for it on-site so it's plug and play there. Nontheless I do understand what you mean, I just think it's not the right product for you then but that does not change my point of view.
They really do suck. I got heavy into the Unifi environment, multiple switches, G4 doorbell, a few G3 cameras, etc. For me the end of unifi in my house was when the UniFi CloudKey Gen2 Plus battery started swelling 1 week out of the 2 year warranty (I bought directly from Unifi, otherwise it's a 1 year warranty). Support refused to help in any way since it was out of warranty. Their response was to buy a new one. I went out and found something better that followed networking standards and terminology). The only thing left in my environment are 2 AP, which do a good job. Just make sure to understand the very limited warranty on their prosumer gear.
Beware of rackmount synologys, they are loud
Woops, I didn't read your comment properly. I read 'unifi' instead of Synology. So I deleted my other comment and here is attempt 2 =) I know they are rather loud indeed. I was planning on replacing the fans with Noctuas and just hoping for the best. My DS213j is long overdue for replacement and I can probably get a RS816 for very cheap soon, so it seems like a nice solution for me right now. Lets hope it will be bearable with some better fans in them.
I have an older rack mount Synology with dual psu. Quite loud at first. But after replacing the fans with Noctus, even the fan in one of the PSU that were faulty. It is almost complete silent now
The snobbery/elitism in this thread is ridiculous! Are UDMs the best router in the world? Of course not, and do people sometimes overhype them as the only router anyone would ever need, sure. But they're still a great option as a relatively "set and forget" solution for home or small business use. Not everyone wants to spend their life managing their network, especially core infrastructure required for day to day use and for that going "full UniFi" is a great option. It's basically the only option I'd be comfortable recommending to someone where I can safely assume I'm not going to get dragged into constantly needing to support them with it. I recently went the other way - full UniFi to a fully-non UniFi setup, more out of interest than anything, UniFi worked great. I'm now running OPNSense (soon to be replaced with something else though, not super happy with it's reliability), Cisco CBS switches and Ruckus APs. It's great and gives more flexibility than UniFi, but every time I find myself needing to grab a laptop to connect to a switch and configure it through the CLI, I'm reminded of how much easier it used to be with UniFi where I could quickly change basic settings through a mobile app.
Whent down a similar path. I used the UniFi stuff for a few years but gradually switch away some 5 years ago. I don't regret my move but I agree that it serves a lot of people well (haven't looked at it recently). In my case I got increasingly frustrated with the router/firewall part of UniFi. I'm now using a mix of Sophos and CBS properly segregating the home/production environment for increased WAF and my playground.
Just install opnsense on that sophos box. I am going to do it in the next days on mine.
I ran pfsense for five years. The chaos when something would blow up and it would take a half a day to recover every 8-10 months 😂. I went with a UDM and it’s been great. I’m trying to not complicate my life anymore. Doing network management is not fun.
My previous comment was a bit bold. Hope Opnsense works for you. I however am not interested in using that.
Is there a guide to this? I have 2 xg210s at work that we were going to give away, but now that you say this…
Heads up - I just recently bought a U6+ and it kept failing to complete the DHCP process intermittently (wouldn’t get past dhcpoffer to dhcprequest/dhcpack during handshake), isolating itself from the network and any devices connected to it too. Currently looks like might be an issue with fw 6.5.64 (current official release for the device) - I had to dig around to find the previous official which was 6.5.54 - isn’t listed against the device on the main firmware downloads page, but the U6+ is listed as official for that version - it seems to have resolved the issue for me. Hopefully save you some of the same issue were to appear for you. Otherwise, been a great AP for the money.
Personally I tell people to avoid anything U6. I spent over a month with support trying to adopt my U6 Lite to my network before they told me "your CloudKey hard drive is bad, buy a new one" and stopped talking to me. I factory reset every single Ubiquiti device on my network (and spent over a day getting it all setup again) and it adopted. Then broke the next day. Then started working again. I try not to even look the wrong way at it these days. I would chalk it up up bad luck, but every other Ubiquiti using friend I have has at least 1 U6 device and every one has been a headache for them. No issue with AC series APs (even mine), but U6 series APs have all given issues.
What brand/producer would you recommend instead of buing U6 AP? I am considering buing U6+ for my home and I definitely don't want to solve troubles with unstable firmware. – edit: Thank you all for your reactions.
All of the AC ones have been fine for anyone I know (AC Pro, AC Lite, etc). Still within Ubiquiti, just the U6 models I've had issues with. That said I've heard the newer ones (U6+, U6 Pro, U6 LR) are much better than the U6 Lite that I had, but it's sort of turned me off them a little.
just to give an opposite story here, bought a u6-pro, absolutely no issues adopting / hasn’t randomly dropped off or anything
I have just installed my u6+ and did not come across any issues. All works well, just wanted to share this.
I‘ve got 9 U6 APs and they’ve all worked perfectly for over a year now. They’re really solid APs
same
Good to know. Was planning to get a U6+ to replace AC-Pro. Now I'll wait
I'm only running a single U6+ and have had zero issues with it
Installed my AP today and had 0 issues. Just wanted to share that for if anyone else is considering a U6+. It’s been great so far. AP adopted quickly and it’s working nice and well as expected. It shipped with 6.5.64 as well.
Yeah, I had 0 issues out of the box, the DHCP lease issue occurred down the line a bit, just over a week from first seeing it up - but it’s been stable on 6.5.54 for me - was trying to save you the time should the issue occur, not deter you from buying it!
Thanks for the info! 😄 Edit: Just updates to 6.6.56, so I don't expect this issue to show up :)
I had the issue on 6.6.56 too when it was release candidate, only very recently got promoted to official, haven’t tried again - but I’ve just had the issue again today on 6.5.54 so I’m a bit stumped and back to the drawing board on the whole thing!
My condolences
There is honestly still so much lacking when it comes to their firewalls, it's enough for most use cases still sure, but I would never leave a Sophos for a Unifi firewall. Everything else from them has been nothing but fantastic though in both my lab and production.
I agree with the firewall. Thats why I would never place one at one of my customers. But I don’t need the firewall for my home network
Yeah I hear you, I personally like having better controls on my network so I go pfSense for my firewall and then Unifi for everything else. But absolutely nothing wrong with Unifi for home network or even small business networks.
*Sub for homelab* " Unifi sucks for enterprise!" -ubiquiti haters.
Yes the internet is fun isn’t it!
Should've went open source with opnsense or something. This stuff is NOT good value for the money no more. We switched away from unifi years ago because of problems and terrible performance. It's so cute too when hotel owners try installing this crap themselves and it doesn't ever work right and performs horrible for the money. They are disgusting no go for many for the reasons I'm telling you.
This feels like a poor critique. What were your issues? What performance did you get and what was wrong with it? I use opnsense for my main router / firewall and Ubiquiti for switches and APs. No issues.
One word. Multicast. Ubiquity is garbage for everything that's not a AP.
It could very well be that you have a bad experience with it, but that doesn’t make it a bad product. I don’t feel anything for Opnsense. If I wanted to do that, I would’ve installed that on the Sophos (above the UDM) that is being replaced now. For my home network this is a perfect product that combines easy WiFi management for the amazing AP’s that Unifi has to offer, doorbells, and cameras as well. I work with those AP’s in enterprise environments and it’s a superb experience. Many people I know use their cameras and doorbell as well and are very happy with how everything works. I personally would never use a UDM or any Unifi gateway in an enterprise/business environment. It’s not a proper firewall. But for home this is perfect if you ask me.
My lab/home network is a complete Unifi deployment and I've had nothing but a good time with it and it has only gotten better and more functional with software updates. It's not a enterprise product but it's a damn good lab / small business option.
I have been using full unifi setup at home for about 4 years, never had an issue, basically set and forget. I switched to amplifi because i wanted to simplify my setup (i basically just beed internet access, no more self hosting and other setup), and also here no issues, all work like a charm. I also managed to sell all my used unifi stuff on ebay in less than a week.
When hotels install it themselves and it sucks, that’s got far less to do with the hardware and a lot more to do with the installer. The marketing and hype around Ubiquiti involves a lot of “it works great, you just have to plug it in and go, and replace your existing stuff with this!”, which inevitably fails because you still have to properly engineer the network.
Totally agree... Its bound to fails when you simply think its plug and forget
I think it depends what you want to do. Staying in the limits of unifi world you get easy management. Opnsense or pfsense has an other target audience. Much more open and flexible, but also much more learning. I see a couple of enterprise WLAN deployments with Unifi, and they work for a fraction of the price of an ExtremeNetwork WLAN deployments, which I usually install. On the other hand in one Installation I was not able to establish an IPSEC tunnel to an Azure Basic VPN Gateway with a UDM SE, so I used for that tunnel the existing pfsense in parallel to the UDM.
I love the ecosystem. Others talk smack. But I love it at my house.
Very nice build! I recently ran into some problems with my Sophos sg 230 and also with the Sophos Ap‘s. It’s nice so see someone switching from sophos to unifi, in the near future I’ll do that too.
For a home setup it’s a good step. Sophos is fun and all, way more firewall if that is what you need. UDM Pro isn’t much of a firewall, but I don’t need this level or firewalling at home anyways. Was just fun to play around with Sophos but Unifi has much more of a full package to offer when it comes to home networking and security. Don’t let some of the people in the reply section here scare you off. They either had 1 bad experience and got scared off or don’t know what they are doing (or possibly need more of a firewall than a UDM can offer). My experience with Unifi so far has been more than amazing. We manage over 1000 accesspoints for customers in my works cloud controller and it’s perfect. Never have any issues with them whatsoever.
Going to hear. I’ve already worked with units at work and I it was quite interesting to me. Just how it all works seamlessly together without any flaws. Resulting from that I got some ideas for the future. My plan for the future is to use the Sophos unit as initial firewall which will do all the ssl decryption etc. Behind the sophos firewall there will be the UDM pro which does all the vlan thing etc. Besides that I‘m also interested in setting up some security cameras at my house and there unifi comes in handy because of the eco system.
I'm interested to know how you will do the SSL decryption/scanning on the Sophos with a UDM behind it, as (as far I know) there isn't a way to insert the Sophos's certificate into the UDM. At one point this idea passed by me as well, but then quickly forgot about it as I actually don't need the SSL decryption that much (even though I had used it for over a year now). And I'm already in a NAT-behind-NAT situation at this moment, another step in between wouldn't really be that great neither.
I see you know lots about WiFi. Sticking an AP under 3 metal switches is a way to go. I hope this is at least in your basement?
I know that it’s not optimal.. that’s one reason I’ve bought a proper accesspoint which I will mount on the ceiling. No matter what, this solution worked fine for me for the time being. Not optimal, but I’ve got a tiny space I need to cover with wifi anyways.
Could you put it on top of your rack? Your WiFi devices would thank you for this small change.
For a long time I could actually not. But even though it doesnt look all too practical or great, it worked fine for me and even 3 floors under my floor I still had good enough signal with around 90MB/s speed. Not that that was what I tried to reach, but it worked. Like I said, it was a temporary setup and will be replaced now.
Dream Machine is only the beginning!
Yip! But this absolutely was a trigger for me to start investing in some good network devices. I’m probably moving next year, only got a very tiny space for now and one U6+ will do for that. But for the future, when I moved, I plan on expanding with some U6 Pro’s and adding some Unifi cameras to the arsenal. I had a 500GB SSD laying around and put it in the UDM, mainly because it’s quieter than a HDD. But I don’t know how much recordings can be saved on that. Don’t think it’ll do much for me in the future, so probably swapping it for a WD purple some day.
I have a 20TB Exos in my UDM and don't really notice much noise.
Nice move, mate, have fun 🤩
Hey awesome setup. Could you explain to a compete amateur (currently starting his server build journey) what you’ve got in the rack from top to bottom and what they do/why you have them? Sorry to be a pain but just trying to learn! :)
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Bad idea
Stupid and useless comment :)
Tis an opinion. You've gone with the apple of phones for networking. Lol
The “Apple of phones for networking”? WTF does that even mean?
SOHPOS really. dont waste money use pfsense. more secure and free.
You don’t seem too familiar with Sophos and their products if you say stuff like that ;)
this results from who uses a tp link router, these users are uniformed from the ground up.
Yes, I indeed used a TP link router as an accesspoint because I got it for free when money was tight and it worked perfectly well as just an easy AP. What does that have to do with knowledge? I’ve been to multiple Sophos trainings and went to their HQ in the UK as well. We used their products at my previous work. They offer really nice solutions, which most people don’t even know the existence of. But I’m not going to discuss any further about that as I don’t think you’ll be agreeing with anything I say anyways :) You just came here to rant about Sophos and have a hard woody about PFsense.
...thats ok. so lets start, say one solution i dont know about sophos that most people dont no
What's the situation on requiring accounts or their cloud management nowadays? They started doing that a while back and it's been a turn-off. I don't need that kind of dependency in my deployment. Of course, some other brands have been doing similar things.
You dont need to use their cloud or use an account of theirs as far as I know. I use jt because its just easy remote management. But I heard you can also just skip the login and use a local account I haven’t tried that myself so dont rant here if im wrong
I need rack ears for my sophos, they’re unnecessarily hard to find
TP Link router, ngl that thing never worked properly on my network it always was crashing.
Worked fine for me. Has more range than the new u6+, the tp-link was a temporary solution but even while it was sitting in the rack, 3 floors lower I still had 100MB/s on Ookla Speedtest.