[carimura]

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!

[AlexandrB]

There's one big gotcha with Unifi cameras, where you have to cloud-connect your Unifi system if you want "AI" detections[1] (anything other than simple motion detection). I'm hoping they fix it some day[2], but for now I just have motion detection on my Unifi hardware. If this is a problem for you, make sure you understand the tradeoffs here before you commit to a Unifi system.

[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/Ubiquiti/comments/1cifnut/unifi_pro...

[2] https://old.reddit.com/r/Ubiquiti/comments/1dbyvan/home_assi...

[alt227]

Still dont understand why this is such a big issue, and I have been reading threads about it for a year now.

Just turn on cloud access, accept the t&cs and then turn it off again. If you are really scared then you can isolate that device in a vlan or DMZ temporarily.

I run many commercial and residential networks, and this is definitely a non issue for me.

[bisby]

https://store.ui.com/us/en/products/ai-key

Even this only reviews "Smart Detections" and I have smart detections turned off on my Unifi cameras, because it enables cloud AI. Having the ability to have an AI key to process detections locally would be great.

Also, having to buy extra hardware kinda stinks. Would love to be able to have a self hosted Unifi OS server that can do AI key abilities if the hardware supports it.

[thebruce87m]

If only the system would cope with power outages I would agree. My viewports refuse to reconnect to the cameras and need multiple forgets/adoptions to come back to life. The (wired) cameras themselves take hours before they show up again, except for the (WiFi) doorbell. During this period I can see the all online via the managed ubiquiti switches.

[mohaine]

I've been using unfi protect/capture (I self hosted capture for a long time) for years and have never had a forgotten adoption any they almost never go down. I do have everything on UPS now but I never saw the issue before that either.

That said I've only used the wired bullet cams so maybe other models are not so nice.

Really the only downside I've seen is about 5ish years ago, all the bullet cams I bought would die after about .75 -> 3 years. All died with the same issue and I had 100% failure rate with any bought during that time frame. Ubiquiti replaced the ones that died during the warranty period but most died just after that expired.

The ones bought before or after that have been great so the issue was solved but I have a nice stack of dead ones that would work great as fake cameras, especially as their IR leds still light up.

[Ultimatt]

Surely the expected solution for that is a UPS on the POE switch?

[brentm]

Yea Ubiquiti is brutal after a power outage. I got a battery back up for my rack just to avoid post power outage down time.

[carimura]

huh, strange, never had this issue with any of my camera's. takes... a minute to come back online.

[amluto]

My general impression is that it “Just Works” if you don’t do anything remotely interesting with it.

Want to create a VLAN with no Internet connectivity? Better test that it actually has no Internet connectivity because the setting doesn’t actually work.

Want to use the firewall? Better test all the rules — it’s amazingly buggy.

Want to change a WiFi setting without WiFi going down for a minute or two? Good luck — UniFi doesn’t seem to care about making it work.

Want to find information (MAC, switch port, DHCP reservation, etc) about a device that uses the same MAC address on multiple VLANs? Good luck — it looks like UniFi utterly flubbed either their database schema or whatever interface their front end uses to talk to their backend about it, and it’s very, very broken.

Want to find basically any setting based on online docs? Too bad — they keep moving the settings and not updating the docs.

[rsync]

Just to reiterate for those that missed it:

If you change the schedule of a WiFi network your entire network (wired and everything) goes down for two minutes.

Just a simple admin policy change… full network outage.

Clown. College.

[c0nsumer]

The thing that made me move off of it was issues connecting to devices on mesh'd APs if the ARP entry for that device timed out on the main AP.

Literally couldn't connect to my mobile phone, and after a lot of troubleshooting (which Unifi does pretty much nothing to help you with) I found that when the phone had roamed to the mesh'd AP, ARPs for it wouldn't get answered. If I forced it back to a wired AP or manually added it to the table... all worked fine. Went unfixed for years, heck, I still don't know if it is...

And all the "alerts" about malicious traffic that a bunch of prosumers seem to love? It's not very actionable for figuring out if it's really a problem nor digging deeper...

Oh, and when they had a firmware update that changed the SSID maximum length from 32 (the spec) to 31. My SSID is 32 characters and after that I could no longer edit the network without a UI error. That sucked.

I'm now on OPNsense and Ruckus APs and while it's not as integrated, I couldn't be happier.

[stirlo]

This. They make excellent access points and their lite beam/air fibre products are great.

But UniFi has serious limitations when it comes to anything beyond the basics. An off the self Asus all in one home router actually has more features and capabilities.

[psyclobe]

Idk about you but I’m rocking a site to site link to my parents house, I have vlans for each segment in my home network (iot, priv etc) with full ipv6 routing and custom filtered dns over https with full network name resolution for all dhcp clients by their hostname on my local subnet domain…

I have complete control over my kids network access, can block specific types of traffic by app type or time based rules. I have high visibility into my WiFi setup and everything is on prem and self hosted and integrated with home assistant…

[ThePowerOfFuet]

This was absolutely my experience. I ended up tearing it all out and selling it on eBay.

I run OPNsense now with a Ruckus standalone AP, and it has been bulletproof.

[kingnothing]

I took a hybrid approach -- Unifi for everything except the firewall, and a Firewalla for that. I'm overall quite happy with it, although you won't get a single pane of glass for management.

[outworlder]

Most people don't want to do anything 'interesting'. If you stray too far from the beaten path, I'd argue that you no longer need or something that "Just Works". You need something very configurable, which, by definition, will let you shoot yourself in the foot.

My current setup is Mikrotik for wired and Ubiquity APs for wifi. Their wifi devices have great specs and are difficult to beat. Mikrotik has decent wifi devices but not only they have a footgun minefield - not exactly their fault since Wifi is difficult to get right, so the more settings you expose, the worse it gets. Mikrotik also logs behind in features (they are still at wifi 6). It's an odd combination of philosophies but seems to work, all the vlan logic is offloaded to Mikrotik. And so are firewalls, etc. Then the voodoo Wifi stuff gets handled by Ubiquiti.

> Want to change a WiFi setting without WiFi going down for a minute or two? Good luck — UniFi doesn’t seem to care about making it work.

I am with you on that. It's things like that that prevent adoption by larger businesses and contribute to the perception that they aren't a serious contender. I previously had an Aruba InstantOn setup(which is focused on SMB), and got really accustomed to being able to tweak (most) settings without any interruptions at all. I could even do things like change channel widths (in one direction) without losing connectivity. What was really surprising on Unifi is that I lost connection when I changed settings for a _different_ SSID, for like a minute. That isn't really acceptable.

They still do a lot of things right though, and it shouldn't be too difficult to get their act together. The devices are pretty decent and at a surprisingly low price point.

[petepete]

I did this in 2023 and my experience has been the same. Had 0 problems other than Sonos being, well, Sonos.

Recently set up CCTV at my parents’ with a Cloud Gateway Max, set up a site to site VPN in 3 clicks and now I can support remotely and their Sony smart TV can see my Jellyfin server.

[donmcronald]

IIRC some Sonos issues are related to STP. AFAIK it's, like you said, Sonos being Sonos. Lol.

[anotherhue]

I am more interested in your childhood than your network at this point.

[esseph]

That's because Robert Pera, CEO/founder used to work for Apple for a few years when he was very young.

[shermantanktop]

Has he said that?

I did a lot of jobs when I was very young. I wouldn't want someone to draw conclusions about me today based on my failed stint at Burger King, for example.

[1a527dd5]

> I finally got around to my childhood dreams of building a home network rack

My childhood dream was to build crazy buildings, before that it was a space explorer. Not sure a home network rack ever made the list!

[carimura]

ok well technically my original network dream was rows and rows of 14.4k baud modems, so we've come a ways since then.

[kwanbix]

I really love my Dream Machine. Super reliable. What I don't like that much is their UI. It is super weirdly done. It is not natural to use, at least if like me, you use it once every 6 months or more.

[donmcronald]

I like the way they do VLANs. It's easy enough that it can be managed by people that don't understand all the low level terminology.

[whalesalad]

> feels like they take inspiration from Apple

the founders are ex-Apple