After many (many!) years I finally got around to my childhood dreams of building a home network rack, centered around the Unifi stack. I've got the new 10 gig switch, the dream machine SE, a bunch of cameras, and I've been very impressed with their stuff. The experience "just works" and feels like they take inspiration from Apple. The whole camera setup can be "closed" by shutting off outside access, this self-hosting option takes it all a step further for those who care deeply about privacy!
Recently switched from a UDM Pro Max to a Firewalla Gold Pro and couldn't be happier about the move. Software that works > software that has everything but requires magic to get checkboxes to adhere to a save state-this is a common issue with UniFi Network options. They need far better QA before I recommend anyone use them as an OS.
I may be misunderstanding this, but as I recall originally the only way to run unifi was to have self hosted it through an app on a Windows machine on your network, then it went to the cloud, then cloud only, and now it seems to be coming back to self hosted? Good if so.
(UniFi is their app/system to configure your ubiquiti network devices and to gather stats from them, it really did change the networking industry for such a low cost product at the time)
There was a lot of drama around Ubiquity a few years back. Happy to see the company is still alive and the indicator that they're coming back around to self hosting. All the hardware I bought a decade ago is still running fine (without any of the cloud software) and it looks like their newer stuff would be worth the upgrade (10gb everywhere, easily, at last).
This launches with UniFi Network and UniFi InnerSpace, which is a deployment visualization tool. I assume they'll add more of the applications to UniFi OS in the future
I use this script to install and update UniFi Network [0]. The script is ages old, has been tuned with all kinds of options including acme/letsencrypt, gets updated regularly, very solid. Also installs & upgrades Mongodb.
The self-hosted Unify Network can’t upgrade itself, but it does have a button to verify whether a release is available. I check that option once in a while. When an update is available, I ssh into the VM, execute the latest-release script, answer a few questions and let it do its thing. Done. It even updates the underlying Linux if you wish.
Until bugs in UniFi OS Server get ironed out, this script is highly recommended.
I've been self-hosting a Unifi controller (now called 'Unifi Network') for years in a Docker container, and before that I'd run it on a Windows machine whenever I needed to make changes to the configuration - I assume this pivot to call the self-hosted version 'UniFi OS' implies a future where more than just the Network application can be self-hosted.
I set up a small Ubiquiti setup with Pi-hole, then moved into a home serviced by AT&T Fiber, which comes with an all in one fiber modem and WiFi hub. I started using it before I could unpack, then did a little research on how I could disable WiFi, DHCP, and/or DNS in order to use my own equipment. The WiFi isn't great in all parts of the house so I planned on setting up APs at strategic points. But of course laziness, fear of stuff breaking and my family getting mad at me, and WiFi entrenchment has stopped me from using any of the equipment I bought. I would one day love to switch back over, but I just don't see it happening soon.
># src: Mirano Verhoef
># Go into root
>su -
>
># Install all required dependencies
apt update ; apt upgrade ; apt install podman -y ; cd ~ ; mkdir 4.2.23 ; cd 4.2.23 ; wget https://fw-download.ubnt.com/data/unifi-os-server/8b93-linux... ; chmod +x 8b93-linux-x64-4.2.23-158fa00b-6b2c-4cd8-94ea-e92bc4a81369.23-x64 ; ./8b93-linux-x64-4.2.23-158fa00b-6b2c-4cd8-94ea-e92bc4a81369.23-x64 install
This is some of the jankiest install installations I've seen in a long time. Not even using && to stop on an error, just plowing ahead for more errors to stack up.
My issue with this comment is my issue with the original article -- what's the actual source for this information?
As far as I can tell, this article has no actual link back to any Unifi press release, git repo, or other project page about this, the closest the author does is link the downloads from Ubiquiti's site (as in, literally, links to the files, and nothing else).
This is janky, yes, and I'm not gonna shill for Ubiquiti, but for lack of a legitimate source, I don't think this is a fair representation of the actual install steps.
This is awesome because of how un-Apple-like it is. With Apple, they leverage the ecosystem and force you to buy everything to make a cohesive experience. Want to have cellular on your Mac? We expect you to buy an iPhone and a laptop and tether.
If you want to have unifi WAPS without the UCG - this enables that. It's awesome that they do that, even though right now, it's the cohesiveness of the Unifi ecosystem that is a big driver in their success.
I love the idea of centrally managing network infrastructure that can be ‘self-contained’ in a local service (whether a device, VM, or container).
TP-Link offers a similar solution via their ‘Omada’-enabled devices. Unfortunately, mixing different brands can feel counterproductive, so there’s significant vendor lock-in.
Does anyone know of a similar solution for OpenWrt devices?
Self answering here:
Seems like OpenWisp[1] is what I was looking for.
I haven't used it yet, but I'm adding it to my bucketlist (currently using Omada, but a bit dissapointed with the sluginess)
> Seems like OpenWisp[1] is what I was looking for.
When I last looked into openWISP, it was a pretty good effort but has a very hard dependency on openWRT. If your entire network is not made up of hardware that has "good/stable" openWRT support then you're going to have a bad time.
I don't think there are any 10g switches that run openWRT well yet, for example. [0]
[0]: Yes, I know openWRT runs on amd/intel but those devices have a few NICs at most. There are no 48 port 1/10gig switches that run openWRT as far as I know...
If I were a hospital, financial brokerage, etc, I would use Cisco.
But since we're a small business < 50 employees, with 4 sites (office, call center, colocation, cloud) Ubiquiti makes it unbelievably easy to administer, even though I know I'm leaving plenty of performance on the table in terms of switching performance, latency, QoS, and throughput.
Surprised at S2S VPN performance at these price points as well! More than adequate!
I really wish PC with some good m.2 wifi cards in it were more of an option for wireless. PC based routers are awesome, there's great software. It's just the wifi situation keeping us tethered to very special boxes.
Even openwrt has severe limits. It's up to you to flap on all manners of optimizations and tweaks to what is basically a hostapd.cond file. Hostapd.conf is the gatekeeper of one of the most important connective channels on the planet, and we collectively know so so so little of it.
At least the m.2 & m-pcie cards have finally started getting somewhat better availability. It's still 90% Compex reference designs, but they're somewhat purchaseable, after years of this stuff being super hard to get ahold of. Seems usually to be ~$200, for a card that'll do wifi-7 2x2 5+5GHz (ex: Compex WLTE7002E55, using Qualcomm's QCN6274).
This is great and I hope they release all the other apps that right now can only be added on a Dream Router/Dream machine, etc.
What I would like to see:
1. IPv6. I tried for several days to patch various warts in the Unifi Network Server (the unofficial docker container), to make it run on IPv6 only. Everytime I managed yet another horrible hack in some library they are using, I discovered 4 other bugs that prevent IPv6 only operation. There's always stuff that expects an IPv4 address in Unifi.
2. Managing my own hardware gateway from Unifi UI. I get it that Unifi doesn't make money from supporting this, but it would be very cool. Their gateway is not super complicated, and there are materials explaining how to "adopt" some random device, in the end you still need a cert from the company to make it work.
You really don't need a Ubiquiti account. They of course make it the default, but you can check a "local user only" box and then just create a local user with a username and password. I really appreciate this about them. You don't need internet to set it up.
I have nothing but good things to say about ubiquiti. I run their cameras door bell and network switches at my house and have had nearly 100% uptime for years. Their ui constantly improves and it’s very well integrated into home assistant.
Lotta haters out there but this is just advanced as I want to get in my home lab; and the racks are just so cool even with their gimmicky front touch panel, it’s just so sexy when all the displays in the rack sync up on their animations. Whoever designed these things really had an eye for design.
I just think £360 for an IP camera is too steep, half would be a no brainier over ring. Their new Lite switches replace stuff that was rack-mountable, not there's no ears are far as I can tell.
You have to get pretty high in their product range before you hit £360 for a camera. The G3 Instant is probably the closest to a Ring competitor (Wifi, 2K video) and it's £78.
The £360 camera is the G5 Pro, which is a 4K camera with 3X optical zoom. I'm not aware of any Ring camera with optical zoom. If you don't need the zoom, the G6 Bullet is a 4K camera without zoom for £190, and the G5 Bullet is 2K for £126. As far as I know, Ring's highest resolution camera is 2K.
But Unifi isn't really trying to be a Ring competitor -- Ring caters to home users with little knowledge of networking, Unifi is more for small businesses (who use an integrator to install their system) or prosumers with more advanced network knowledge.
> Lotta haters out there but this is just advanced as I want to get in my home lab
IN all fairness, that hate is reasonable. Ubiquity has _some_ things done super well. As long as your needs are addressed by the config/options/UX/API that they expose, you'll have a pretty good experience. As soon as you need to do something that isn't easy, you're going to be fighting your core network infra the entire time and that's a miserable place to be.
Stick to unifi for switches and *basic* routing. Use their LED lighting / Cameras / Access Control and other side-projects at your discretion.
I love my ubiquity kit, but they annoy me with half finished stuff.
I upgraded my venerable USG with the new UXG as I have gig service now. The gear is great, even supports IPv6, and uses much less power. But… no internal DNS is enabled. So now, I ended up buying a thin client on eBay to roll my own DHCP/DNS. Not fun. It is baffling to me because there’s lots of complex new features in the Unifi stack, and they already had an interface to configure static names in dnsmasq.
I went the Eufy route for cameras as the batteries were a big draw for me.
I still use their access points because it's hard to get anything else as good for the same kind of price, but they burned me killing the development on EdgeRouter.
So I've gone elsewhere for cameras, switching and routing.
This release is a nice point in their favour though but I can't see myself going back all in on Ubiquiti.
I set up my home network with their USG (the small square one they don't even make any more) and a couple wireless access points all the way back in 2018 and all of it has been rock solid ever since. In 7 years I've never actually needed to "reboot my router" to fix any kind of weird network problems like is common with whatever consumer junk they sell at Best Buy. It all just sits there, working quietly, and I don't even think about any of it for months at a time.
I have nothing but bad things to say about my shitty UDM from Ubiquiti.
It has issues with 2.4Ghz speeds, it randomly restarts because their software is buggy as hell. Their Apple style UI sucks ass and they have a mobile app that you can barely do anything in so you may as well just go to the web interface.
They have no features like proper QoS (smart queueing does NOT count) and even just little things, like not being able to search clients by IP, or ordering by current speed never working quite properly.
It's a fancy UI over crappy code that's been duct taped together. As soon as I move house I'm moving to Mikrotik again. For APs I may keep unifi, as they're very good at that one thing, but their routers/switches suck imo.
Like others have said, the edgerouter issues have left a somewhat bad taste in the mouth, it felt like the product line was being ignored and abandoned for a long time.
And Ubiquiti seemed to get impacted more than other similar companies by supply chain problems that came following covid, but they do seem to have picked up again noticeably over the last 18-24 months, with lots of new product releases.
Ubiquiti is honestly excellent when it works. When something goes wrong, though, their support really falls flat, as I experienced just this weekend when my Dream Wall died early on a Sunday morning. I'm still working with a makeshift network waiting for a replacement.
I've been researching options for a new ground-up home network setup in a new house, and so far UniFi stuff is on top of my list. FTTH company will install their stuff up to an NT in the basement, and from there it'd be my setup - a UCG Ultra gateway, couple of PoE switches across the main house and outbuilding, and 2-3 Wifi 7 APs sprinkled around.
From all I've been looking at, looks like it's the most straightforward setup. Fully centrally managed via the gateway, leaves me plenty of options for PoE-powered security cameras and other expansions in the future, can be upgraded on a component basis when desired, and integrates nicely in HomeAssistant. And with all that, not even really more expensive than what seems like much more fiddly alternatives like the TPLink Omada system and others.
>Lotta haters out there but this is just advanced as I want to get in my home lab
The problem with UBNT isnt that they aren't great for your homelab. They are.
The problem with UBNT is people think "Great for my homelab" is the same as "I can run important infrastructure on this"
The problem with UBNT/Mikrotik is that people bring homelab level skills to complex infrastructure projects and then make a shocked face when they get hacked.
How's the "management" software? I'm planning on replacing my aging home router (which now seems to randomly drop signal) with something like a Ubiquti Dream Router, but I've no experience with the brand. As of now, I run PfSense at home (just as a hobbyist and for personal desires), and I'm curious how their offering compares, especially wrt to firewall rules, VPN support, etc.
It's wonderful. I run a UCG Max at home to support both my internet needs and camera storage. Run their other gear in several other SMB environments, including a condo where we're using it for office, building automation, and public area networking along with around 80 cameras. Dead simple to understand.
Crosstalk Solutions, MacTelecom Networks, and Lawrence Systems all do youtube videos on UI's gear and setup - may help give you an idea of the experience before you commit to kicking off your addiction.
75 comments
[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 90.1 ms ] threadMy childhood dream was to build crazy buildings, before that it was a space explorer. Not sure a home network rack ever made the list!
1 of numerous examples: https://community.ui.com/questions/Device-Static-IP-Not-Savi...
https://help.firewalla.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/44144642...
This launches with UniFi Network and UniFi InnerSpace, which is a deployment visualization tool. I assume they'll add more of the applications to UniFi OS in the future
The self-hosted Unify Network can’t upgrade itself, but it does have a button to verify whether a release is available. I check that option once in a while. When an update is available, I ssh into the VM, execute the latest-release script, answer a few questions and let it do its thing. Done. It even updates the underlying Linux if you wish.
Until bugs in UniFi OS Server get ironed out, this script is highly recommended.
[0] https://community.ui.com/questions/UniFi-Installation-Script...
This is some of the jankiest install installations I've seen in a long time. Not even using && to stop on an error, just plowing ahead for more errors to stack up.
As far as I can tell, this article has no actual link back to any Unifi press release, git repo, or other project page about this, the closest the author does is link the downloads from Ubiquiti's site (as in, literally, links to the files, and nothing else).
This is janky, yes, and I'm not gonna shill for Ubiquiti, but for lack of a legitimate source, I don't think this is a fair representation of the actual install steps.
Things like this get the information out there in human-readable form to be understandable, and error checking would be for the reader.
Or said another way, more like gist.github.com vs github.com/some÷project.git
If you want to have unifi WAPS without the UCG - this enables that. It's awesome that they do that, even though right now, it's the cohesiveness of the Unifi ecosystem that is a big driver in their success.
TP-Link offers a similar solution via their ‘Omada’-enabled devices. Unfortunately, mixing different brands can feel counterproductive, so there’s significant vendor lock-in.
Does anyone know of a similar solution for OpenWrt devices?
[1] https://openwisp.org/
When I last looked into openWISP, it was a pretty good effort but has a very hard dependency on openWRT. If your entire network is not made up of hardware that has "good/stable" openWRT support then you're going to have a bad time.
I don't think there are any 10g switches that run openWRT well yet, for example. [0]
[0]: Yes, I know openWRT runs on amd/intel but those devices have a few NICs at most. There are no 48 port 1/10gig switches that run openWRT as far as I know...
Is UniFi the sweetspot for prosumer networking if one wants switches, APs, cameras, etc. without a CCNP?
But since we're a small business < 50 employees, with 4 sites (office, call center, colocation, cloud) Ubiquiti makes it unbelievably easy to administer, even though I know I'm leaving plenty of performance on the table in terms of switching performance, latency, QoS, and throughput.
Surprised at S2S VPN performance at these price points as well! More than adequate!
Even openwrt has severe limits. It's up to you to flap on all manners of optimizations and tweaks to what is basically a hostapd.cond file. Hostapd.conf is the gatekeeper of one of the most important connective channels on the planet, and we collectively know so so so little of it.
At least the m.2 & m-pcie cards have finally started getting somewhat better availability. It's still 90% Compex reference designs, but they're somewhat purchaseable, after years of this stuff being super hard to get ahold of. Seems usually to be ~$200, for a card that'll do wifi-7 2x2 5+5GHz (ex: Compex WLTE7002E55, using Qualcomm's QCN6274).
[1]: https://git.openwrt.org/?p=openwrt/openwrt.git;a=commit;h=11...
What I would like to see:
1. IPv6. I tried for several days to patch various warts in the Unifi Network Server (the unofficial docker container), to make it run on IPv6 only. Everytime I managed yet another horrible hack in some library they are using, I discovered 4 other bugs that prevent IPv6 only operation. There's always stuff that expects an IPv4 address in Unifi.
2. Managing my own hardware gateway from Unifi UI. I get it that Unifi doesn't make money from supporting this, but it would be very cool. Their gateway is not super complicated, and there are materials explaining how to "adopt" some random device, in the end you still need a cert from the company to make it work.
Right. They don't learn.
> You can also proceed without an Ubiquiti account
Can you? Or you have to make one and only then maybe possibly to some extent run the thing without one?
Lotta haters out there but this is just advanced as I want to get in my home lab; and the racks are just so cool even with their gimmicky front touch panel, it’s just so sexy when all the displays in the rack sync up on their animations. Whoever designed these things really had an eye for design.
The gateways are awesome value.
The £360 camera is the G5 Pro, which is a 4K camera with 3X optical zoom. I'm not aware of any Ring camera with optical zoom. If you don't need the zoom, the G6 Bullet is a 4K camera without zoom for £190, and the G5 Bullet is 2K for £126. As far as I know, Ring's highest resolution camera is 2K.
But Unifi isn't really trying to be a Ring competitor -- Ring caters to home users with little knowledge of networking, Unifi is more for small businesses (who use an integrator to install their system) or prosumers with more advanced network knowledge.
IN all fairness, that hate is reasonable. Ubiquity has _some_ things done super well. As long as your needs are addressed by the config/options/UX/API that they expose, you'll have a pretty good experience. As soon as you need to do something that isn't easy, you're going to be fighting your core network infra the entire time and that's a miserable place to be.
Stick to unifi for switches and *basic* routing. Use their LED lighting / Cameras / Access Control and other side-projects at your discretion.
I upgraded my venerable USG with the new UXG as I have gig service now. The gear is great, even supports IPv6, and uses much less power. But… no internal DNS is enabled. So now, I ended up buying a thin client on eBay to roll my own DHCP/DNS. Not fun. It is baffling to me because there’s lots of complex new features in the Unifi stack, and they already had an interface to configure static names in dnsmasq.
I went the Eufy route for cameras as the batteries were a big draw for me.
So I've gone elsewhere for cameras, switching and routing.
This release is a nice point in their favour though but I can't see myself going back all in on Ubiquiti.
It has issues with 2.4Ghz speeds, it randomly restarts because their software is buggy as hell. Their Apple style UI sucks ass and they have a mobile app that you can barely do anything in so you may as well just go to the web interface.
They have no features like proper QoS (smart queueing does NOT count) and even just little things, like not being able to search clients by IP, or ordering by current speed never working quite properly.
It's a fancy UI over crappy code that's been duct taped together. As soon as I move house I'm moving to Mikrotik again. For APs I may keep unifi, as they're very good at that one thing, but their routers/switches suck imo.
And Ubiquiti seemed to get impacted more than other similar companies by supply chain problems that came following covid, but they do seem to have picked up again noticeably over the last 18-24 months, with lots of new product releases.
From all I've been looking at, looks like it's the most straightforward setup. Fully centrally managed via the gateway, leaves me plenty of options for PoE-powered security cameras and other expansions in the future, can be upgraded on a component basis when desired, and integrates nicely in HomeAssistant. And with all that, not even really more expensive than what seems like much more fiddly alternatives like the TPLink Omada system and others.
The problem with UBNT isnt that they aren't great for your homelab. They are.
The problem with UBNT is people think "Great for my homelab" is the same as "I can run important infrastructure on this"
The problem with UBNT/Mikrotik is that people bring homelab level skills to complex infrastructure projects and then make a shocked face when they get hacked.
From what I've seen it looks far more modern.
Crosstalk Solutions, MacTelecom Networks, and Lawrence Systems all do youtube videos on UI's gear and setup - may help give you an idea of the experience before you commit to kicking off your addiction.