Experience with Unifi Networking equipment

Anyone have any experience, good or bad, with using unifi networking equipment at home? I’m looking at upgrading my home network with a dream machine pro and and 24-port switch pro, along with a few smaller unifi switches around the house and a couple of access points.

Looking at their network management GUI, I am totally geeking out.

The former sysadmin of my workplace is a huge fan, so we have plenty of their equipment. Cheap, reliable and having quite a lot of functionality. As a plain user, I really can’t complain.

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I really like their APs, but I prefer Mikrotik routers and switches.

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We have a dozen or so in the field and I have one at my home office. If your needs fit into its feature set, it’s a great device.

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We use Unifi USG, Switch 8 with PoE, and several wifi access point devices and have been very pleased with the ability to manage them together with Unifi Controller. Excellent devices at good prices.

Be aware that some devices are managed differently, however. For example, in another situation we use their EdgeRouter which is managed through EdgeOS.

+1 for Unifi AP’s

At work we manage about 200+ AP’s and 30+ switches at 50 sites, all through our own hosted Unifi controller. Works well and the kit is a good price for the functionality. Test out all the options for the AP settings, some of the ones which come configured out of the box cause problems in a multi-AP setup.

…which is a modified Debian. I’m happy, because I’ve got 15 years of experience in Debian. I was able to hack some stuff that was not officially supported.

The UDM-Pro was released with very feature-incomplete and very buggy firmware.
Things have improved dramatically over the last few months but there are still some glaringly missing features. The two the spring to mind are the ability to have more than one WAN IP or SNMP monitoring.

It’s a decent bit of hardware and the firmware is improving, but I don’t think it deserves its “Pro” designation just yet.
Far more than good enough to have at home, but I would suggest a bit of digging if you want to deploy it into production environment.

I use a unify switch at home. The Features for the payed price are really awesome. I am using ist for Loadbalancing and failover my internet connection with LTE.
Works like a charme.

Configuration needs some action in the terminal :wink:

They recently had a data breach.


I’m not a fan of their management model and would prefer Mikrotik as well.

I’ve been running several Switches, APs and surveillance recorders for years.

I also equipped a friend’s house, a medical practice, an office at a construction site and a vacation home with Unifi stuff - everything works great.

Yeah, but you can manage everything from the “Unifi” series with their Unifi controller. EdgeRouter, ToughSwitch etc are different product lines.

This is a problem with all of their routers/gateways. It can be worked around but it involves editing configuration files.

That is no longer possible in the new devices due to their migration from Vyatta to their own UniFiOS

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Ah. Good to know!!!

Yes, it caused a bit of a stir in the community.
UniFi seriously dropped the ball in their firmware releases. Inconsistent, buggy, incomplete… there must have been some sort of serious shake-up in the last few months, though, because things started improving significantly. I think the CEO even wrote a letter to the community apologising and promising more transparency.
They’re getting too popular for their own good, it seems…

you should never consider a brand good for everything, it’s best to look at reviews for each individual component of the setup… cannot remember if it was ubiquiti or unifi that got wendel of l1tech’s upset… think it was ubiquiti tho…

i would prefer my network gear to be fully locally managed and only update what and when i ask it to, so the ubiquiti and unifi basic management concepts i’m not a fan off…
ofc if one wants to basically set it and forget it, i’m sure its really nice…

meaning that more competent people can manage updates and security issues, which is nice… if they keep up to date and know what they are doing, which by far isn’t always a given…

never an easy answer for anything… i guess if you want it to be automated its good.
if you want a more manually controlled and highly secure setup, it might not be the best way to go.

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I agree completely with this.

" Adam says the attacker(s) had access to privileged credentials that were previously stored in the LastPass account of a Ubiquiti IT employee, and gained root administrator access to all Ubiquiti AWS accounts, including all S3 data buckets, all application logs, all databases, all user database credentials, and secrets required to forge single sign-on (SSO) cookies."