 Two weeks ago, I made the largest purchase of my life. Well, largest purchase I've made on my own so far. And that was buying a Ubiquiti Dream Machine Pro. Now, this is kind of the epitome of Ubiquiti Networking. Ubiquiti is pretty well known in the networking community. It's kind of like the apple of networking, the apple of internet. And to be honest, they'd kind of deserve that title. They have that polish and that finish on their hardware and their software. And most of that came to why I wanted to buy this. My family, we've been on an aging apple airport system for our networking since they came out. And we were using them and we still are for Wi-Fi, just not for the gateway networking up to today. That Ubiquiti Dream Machine Pro, which is kind of the gateway to the house now, it'll be our network switch and stuff like that. But we really needed to find a newer option than the airport systems. And that's why the Dream Machine Pro came in. Now, I'll mainly be using it for hosting my websites and controlling our home network, as I would like to grow and expand into the Ubiquiti space, learn about some more of their hardware, some more of their software. I would like to experiment with their protect and network equipment. I would even like to check out their voice over IP phones and see if that really is a good alternative to a landline solution. And overall, I just wanted to get into the Ubiquiti space and the best way I could do that would be just buying the UDM Pro, because that basically lets me, it basically is not only a network gateway, but my gateway into the world of Ubiquiti. And after buying it, I just started to realize, okay, that was like $412 with shipping and tax and the product itself. And that's a lot of money, especially to me. So I'm like, okay, so how much everything else gonna cost? Well, a Ubiquiti network switch is like $300 for a 24 port POE switch. A security camera is $130. A phone is $190 if you wanna use it with anything other than Unify Talk, which is $10 a month, which looking back, $10 a month for phone service is not that bad, but still, having to buy an $80 phone on top of that is a lot of money. And now I kinda see why people try to skew away from Ubiquiti if you're in a smaller home solution, but I still feel like they will be my best option. And I'm gonna explain all that in today's video. So without further ado, let's get into today's video and discuss this amazing purchase and where my Ubiquiti setup is going to go from here. So yes, I bought the UDM Pro from Ubiquiti. It's retail price is $380, but for us in Wisconsin, shipping and tax brings up to about $412, pretty much exactly right at that point. So our network system and our server rack just went up in value by $412. Now this also makes it the newest piece of equipment in that server rack by like a couple of years. I mean, technically the Raspberry Pi's are only like two years old, but everything else is relatively old. The network switch in there is from 2010, which I actually shut off because the Unify Dream Machine Pro or the UDM has eight ports built into it. And I was only using like seven of the ports on that switch, which saves us quite a few watts of energy by shutting off that old switch. But when I had that, that was like from 2010 and was still only a 10, 100 megabit switch. So it was pretty slow. Now that our internet got upgraded from 100 megabit per second to 250. And the other newer aspect of the server rack would be the HP ProLiant server that I have. And I use that to run my home lab system. It's got four hard drives, each a terabyte and RAID, I forget what RAID, I think I'm either using RAID one or RAID five on that. So I have about two and a half terabytes of space on that, but that system is like from 2010, 2011. And it is old, but it runs everything I need and I barely use 10% of the system on an average day. And that thing, though I love it, it uses a lot of power, which is why I would like to, eventually, switch over to using these things. These are Mac Minis. And this one's from 2012. I got it from Orchard Resale for like 80 bucks. But these things are incredibly powerful even though they are old. This one, again, is like 86 bucks, but it's got an Intel. It's got an Intel i7, it's got 16 gigs of RAM. I upgraded that on my own because it was cheaper to do it that way. And I put a terabyte SSD in it. And this thing is like double the power of that ProLine switch. The only thing it's missing is the ability to have hardware RAID support and it only has room for one hard drive. But if I find a way to rack mount this in a rack, which you see Tronix and a couple others on Amazon and across the web cell Mac Mini racks that I could use to put that thing in the server rack, I could just get one of those, one or two of them in the server rack and just run something like a Boon 2 server on it because you don't technically need to run Mac OS on those. In fact, I don't think I am. I think I will stick to running something like a Boon 2 or Debian on that. But what I could do is having that Mac Mini, I could then just sync it with something from like OWC. They have rack mounted drive enclosures, which is actually kind of cool. And I could get one of those to sync to that. But that's a future video. Right now we're worrying about the ubiquity system. So the Unify Dream Machine Pro or UDM has been really cool. I like how I'm able to track all of the traffic going through it. I can see how much data I really do use during the day and just how much data like streaming services, like my brother, who's like three years old, watches a lot of Blue E on Disney Plus and Apple TV Plus shows like Duck and Goose and stuff like that. That uses a lot of data. If we were still using our mobile hotspots, we'd be out of data in a day because of how much data live streaming video from streaming platforms like Disney Plus, Apple TV, HBO and stuff like that. Those all do use a lot of data. And then I also realize my day to day operations of web design use a lot of data too. A couple of my websites I do host here in-house. But quite a few of my production sites that I have for clients I do host in the cloud with Linode. And because of that, they send me their videos, they send me their pictures that they want on the site for updates. And I bring them over to my computer and then I upload them to the server through a direct connection. And I'm downloading it from Google Drive or wherever they send them to me from and then I'm uploading it to that server which is a lot of data there too. So in an ungrams team of things, we do use a lot of data and I've finally been able to realize that because the airports have no sense of analytics at all. You can edit your settings and view your wireless connection but there is no analytics on those at all. Now with the Android Machine Pro, I'm able to see a lot of that stuff concluded into one main analytics dashboard. Now of course it does mess up quite often. It'll, if it doesn't know what something is, it'll mark it as like HTTP request or SSL over TLS. It's kind of confusing. Sometimes it can't read it right but overall it does a good job and it catches all the data going through. On top of that, it has threat monitoring which is something I really wanted to get. Because I do host public websites from my house I try to proxy everything through Cloudflare which hides our public IP address at least decently. There is still some ways that you could find it but I'm not gonna share those for obvious reasons but because of that I would like to have a more security that if someone ever did find it they can't break into our internal system. So by doing that I was able to put the server that's hosting my public websites on its own VLAN in the network that is completely isolated from itself. It brings in the incoming data and it can, anything going to that port can only be read by that server and that server only which completely protects the rest of our house to some extent from any attack that could occur. Now I'm no network professional by any scheme but how easy that was to set up was really nice. I would love to get more into networking and learn even through videos on this channel but to be honest, it was really cool just how in like 15 minutes I could get a VLAN set up I could get that server on its own the isolated network as well as launch threat protection for our entire network, our main network and the server's network which surprisingly has blocked a lot of potential DOS attacks not DDoS because most of the time they're just a lot of traffic coming from one source but I've seen in just a couple of days that I've had that on I've seen hundreds of block requests from Unify Console that tells me like hey you had graphic responses from a lot of the ones that we get are from like China, the Philippines, the Middle East countries over there more where DDoS attacks are common to originate in and I see a lot of I see the console blocking a lot of those requests which is nice that it's able to differentiate between legitimate traffic and DDoS attacks and that console on its own combined with cloud flares, proxying and DDoS protection basically means it's almost I'm not saying it's impossible because I know there's always a workaround but to the most part I am protected from a DDoS attack more than someone who is just having a network connection a server open to the internet like it's pretty hard to get through to the server at that point now again, there is a lot that could go wrong and I'm constantly monitoring that I'm constantly learning new skills how to keep my servers secure how to keep my users and clients data secure and this would be the perfect segue to a sponsor for a password manager but there's no sponsor today so you get out of any sponsorship today but the funny thing about that is just how cool it has been there's a lot more that I can do with it this is only the Unify network portion of the Unify OS suite and even then it's like a third of all that Unify network can do if we had the ubiquity Wi-Fi routers and switches and POE devices there's a lot more we could do within Unify network then you can expand into their security camera system with Unify Protect I do have a terabyte hard drive with the UDM which means I could technically start having security cameras but what I want to do is I would like to save up and buy the cameras and their UNBR which is basically just the UDM Pro with a lot more hard drives in it so that I could store all of the data here locally rather than our current system using something like R-Low or Ring and having it all back to the cloud it would be much better to have it here locally then in the cloud because it's faster and of course it's a lot more secure and private which is quite nice when it comes to security cameras especially in a personal residence so with all that said the Unify console is really amazing I still have a lot to learn with it I've been watching a lot of YouTube tutorials Unify tutorials overall it's a lot more simple than I would have been like a Cisco Meraki or something like that or even an enterprise solution but it is kind of expensive so could I recommend it if you have like 412 to 450 bucks to spend sure, you could go ahead and get it it's really amazing if you have a simple home you're not hosting too much they have the Dream Router or the UDR that's only 200 bucks it's sold out as in me recording this video but it has 4 ethernet ports and it has wifi built in so if you just need a really simple console you're not running much more than just a network and maybe a couple security cameras that could work for pretty much any residential installation but if you are gonna go more advanced like I have with VLANs and hundreds of devices that's potentially in the future and DDoS protection stuff like that and you actually need a network firewall and gateway, the UDM Pro is really nice and for the cost I've been able to find it's the best you're gonna get for a residential to small business solution so with all that said I'd like to say thank you for watching this video it was more of me just rambling and talking but I hope some people found it interesting and maybe you learned a little bit about Unify and how I do my networks if you like these just talking head videos and simple videos like this be sure to subscribe and let me know in the comments because I like making them they're simple and it's just fun to be able to talk to people on the internet like this and just kind of share the thoughts that I have so yeah I'd like to say thank you if you did like it be sure to like and subscribe and I'll see you all next time have a great rest of your day and goodbye