 Tom here from Lauren's Systems and we're going to talk about the new features in the Unify network application 6.5.5 3 now just to clear up any confusion when I'm flipping through the different release notes the 6.5.5 1 was the release candidate version where they really talked about all the release updates and changes But the final version was 6.5.5 3 and that has these changes in there Plus a few more little bug fixes bit brought it from release candidate to fully released version now as far as Testing process the testing process I do is I load this pretty much when they come out provided I don't see anything really bad. We do some internal testing I then do some testing for several days and see if it works because well, we manage our clients with this We manage a lot of client sites what we don't do is manage a bunch of cloud keys So my update experience is running on Debian running MongoDB and Java So this is not a what it looks like if you're running on a unified dream machine or if you're running it I'm on the cloud keys. We don't manage those for clients. We manage our clients within our controller and the same thing goes for hostify I will leave a link to their testing process and they have a very similar system where they go through and test all these updates and roll them out hostify for not familiar I've done several videos on them and they just do a great job if people ask me Hey, I want to have a managed controller But I want to be able to have full control over but have someone else manage patches and updates I highly recommend hostify. Yes I do have an offer code because we're an affiliate of theirs And I think it's a great service if you're looking just to not deal with it yourself All right back to the other thing is there are some enhancements to the unified routing equipment But I still stand by my video on a topic linked down below I should you buy a unified dream machine dream machine pro any of the unified routing equipment these updates address a few issues But I'm not going to dive much into them. We just don't deploy these out in the field We don't really recommend them to too many people Unless it's home users or people that well, I watched the video I break it down of who should buy or shouldn't buy a unified dream machine I just feel unfortunate that so many people buy it and it doesn't do what they wanted That's why I made a video that hopefully before you buy you would watch that video and go Oh, it does what I want it to or no that won't fit my needs That's all and this application update doesn't solve that problem And if you're asking what about the new versions of the hardware they're releasing It's all driven by this unified software application. So until the software fixes Address all the problems because it's not really a hardware limitation. It's just the software doesn't do certain things That problem will persist no matter what hardware to release until they fix it all the software All right before we dive into the details this video if you want to learn more about me and my company Head over to learn systems.com if you like to hire share a project There's a hires button right at the top which does include a lot of unifying and network consulting If you want to support this channel in other ways There's affiliate links down below to get you deals and discounts on products and services We talk about on this channel Which yes does include a link if you like to sign up for hostify Because you want someone else to deal with all these patches and updates All right now let's start diving into the details Now as I mentioned we're running unify network application 6.5.53 because that's the full release And you can see it just says fixes gateway configuration failure when traffic rules are configured There's not a lot of other notes on this all the notes you're going to pull them from are the 6.5.51 notes because this is when it was release candidate And this has all the major changes that are essentially for this version The going from 0.51 to 0.53 is the release candidate versus going into full release Now when you're diving into all these details there's a lot But let's just cover a couple of the highlights here and some of these may affect you But as I said we don't have any clients using unify rotting equipment So I'm just going to be skipping over those because I just don't have the time right now to test all of those features Because lack of using unify rotting equipment Now the big things are going to be right down here under bug fixes I've had a lot of people ask me about this. I don't think I've seen it ever on our controller But I know enough people ask about it I know there are scenarios where this happens it gets basically in an adoption loop keeps retrying to adopt something The solution to this when we've had people that have worked with like internal IT teams You work with not on our controller was just to basically Manually adopt them or sometimes push firmware updates to them I don't know exactly what gets out of sync, but they kind of go in a loop like there So they're going to stop retrying to auto adopt after three failed attempts And what happens is when you take the device off it still just kind of goes into a loop of adopting I think restarting controller stops the loop, but yeah, I'm glad they fixed that on there now there's also the Issues with the backups and fixed backup not respecting retention settings for notifications and fixed issue unify network backups Fill up the data partition backups are incredibly important I have mine set to be automatically running it keeps them for so many weeks And then I have a tool that automatically Offloads them from the controller So it's constantly being backed up actually have my backup set to run every hour Because we're always making changes and I never know when those changes might be So when you manage a lot of sites in a single controller for a lot of clients It's important to have all these backups But of course the thing that I do recommend when doing these backups is I only back up the settings and not all the dpi retention and statistics And apparently it decided it was going to back some of those up anyways and didn't respect that I don't know what scenario caused it, but hey, I'm glad they did fix that on there Now one of the other issues that's really nice that they fix is directly related I believe to the adoption problem is auto update device firmware They want adopting new devices the prompt you get is actually to Adopt and update or just adopt then you can update later You'll find that well if their firmware is too many versions behind There may be conflict if you're running too new of a controller and too old of a firmware And you try to adopt that I believe that's what leads to some of those adoption loops I always push the firmware right away to a new device on there prior to adoption But this doesn't give you a choice now. It just goes ahead and updates the new firmware That's actually to me a great thing because I think that's kind of hand in hand solving that adoption if issue If I had to guess as to what's going on there is you get in a loop trying to adopt something That's too many firmware versions behind and I don't really have an issue. I've been pushing all the latest firmware versions I'm up to date as of today november 26 2021 so I haven't had any issues with all the latest firmware on there Now one more thing I'll mention is limit mongo wired tiger cache size to 256 more details here This is kind of related to and I've talked about this before when you start Taking a controller and not managing it for just a few sites and start managing Many sites and many devices You have to do a little bit of tuning for those larger sites and how to tune the new to find network for high number devices They've updated this as well to cover some of the different Connection settings and I've discussed this before for some of our larger ones is making sure you have proper number informed threads proper number of Little details and making sure everything is set proper in here So this has been updated again like enabling high performance java garbage collector. I don't think that was in the last time I looked at this video And mongo wt cache size default equals true now riley chaser would hostify He also does some tuning for the same reasons because some of the clients he has are well They have a thousand two thousand devices may be attached and of course at scale He has quite a few number of instances So you have to do a little bit of fine tuning to make sure all this works for those larger installs It doesn't necessarily work out of the box and it is also one of the reasons where cloud keys will not be optimal If you have too many devices a cloud key you can't tune because there's just not enough hardware to expand the memory to it So it works fine for majority of people But those of us that are running sites say individual sites with like 400 500 or even a thousand devices There is a little bit of tuning you do have to change on there And the last thing i'll talk about on this list that's really exciting is the ability to lock a client to a specific access point This is really helpful if you have iot devices or cameras Because you'll maybe have them in between two access points and maybe it kind of bobs between the One and the other and you want it to lock to a single device This is now ability that you have with this i'll show you how that works It's the ability to lock it but you do require as it says uap firmware 5.76 or newer So I have all my systems up to date. I can show that it's pretty easy to do by the way It's only available in the new UI and let's go ahead and talk about it Because there's a lot of little visual elements here that I could note But let's just show you what they look like and we'll start with the Really well enhanced and this is in the new user interface They did a great job of making this look better making this work smoother And this is your topology display you have in the display options here and this is still a problem I don't know what to do about when you have sites with lots of devices on there It becomes kind of unreadable, but if we narrow it down to just a few devices They've just done a great job of making this look really smooth. I can show descriptions take them away I think this has become Just a great feature overall for those of you mentioning of it's broken for me One you have a controller that this gets broken on asbestos to backup and restore I haven't found another fix that works well as consistently is just reloading and resetting up your controller and restoring the System back from your backup. I've not had any problems running it in devian I have for years this has been an in-place upgrade for quite a number of years, but if this is broken for you Um, yeah, I don't really that's my solution to fixing it on there by default That doesn't show the offline devices you can click that there But this is just to me really nice the way you can Slide these around get them really well and of course they're all clickable now And go right to the settings for any particular device to be able to set things see what link it's plugged into I've I really like this now you notice because i'm using pf sense as my firewall There's not a firewall part of this and if you have any non Unified switches in between you'll end up with just gaps because it doesn't understand non-unified switches But it's great when you do have an full unified switches and access point switcher My favorite things that they have not any of their routing equipment back over to Clicking this and it brings us right back to a nice centered view. Like I said, I think they did a nice job improving this Now, let's talk about how they actually have the unified devices and we have the same display options right here I once again run the new UI. I I think the new UI is coming along quite well And they're making it consistent across all of here So I I'm glad to see progress of how well this works being able to easily see all the columns network I need to save firmware versions if I want I can start displaying everything on here cpu usage I think they did a nice job on this But there is one thing that's still really missing from it. Well, two things major really First one is I liked it better when these could pop out and slide them around That just makes sense because I sometimes want to open two different switches and maybe have them side by side There's no way to do that in the new UI only in the old UI Second big problem is if you are in this UI, there's not an option to restart And that's kind of annoying because I want to be able to just push and say restart or locate Because sometimes you run through and you want to restart devices for Whatever changes you may have made in a network that a restart would solve that problem for And sometimes you want to restart all the devices at once and there's not a group restart But at least I could run down the list and just click restart restart restart on each device and that would work great That's something you have to go into each one and to locate when you're setting up and we've Done videos on how we do these large deployments when we have a whole lot of them on the table We want to locate each one going into each one and going into the Settings and choosing locate seems just way more tedious to flash the system and make it work So I'm not not a big fan of those features being missing, but hey, maybe they'll get them in the new UI We won't have to switch back and forth Now let's go over here to client devices And same thing here. They've done a nice job of showing me the experience And I can see that this is connected gigabit gigabit Fast ethernet and down the list. I can look at each one of these. There's no insights in here because these are only It's only going to give you insights other than some of the connection history If you have one of their routing equipment for the traffic stats, but that's not really a big deal to me And here is the use fix IP address if you're using nerves and default to Uh different profiles, but let's find a wireless device and talk about locking it somewhere And that's where same thing we're going to go for consistency Go over here And I don't want to show any wired clients to show me the 2.4 clients or maybe the 5 gigahertz clients. All right And uh, what do we have here pixel 4? All right, and what's it attached to lock to access point really simple Select access point. We have three different ones here at my office And uh, I can just say only connect to this one here pretty simple way of doing it Maybe I'll do some testing in the future on it. It seemed to work. I didn't really have any problems with it But it's not something I need for my phone But it may be something like I said if you've got some different wireless cameras connected and they're Hopping back and forth between them or you and you have a preferred network access point The kind of the weird workaround was sometimes putting only the wi-fi on those devices that were close to it There's been workarounds for some glad there's no more band-aids and workarounds that the easy way to do it is To go ahead set this lock access point and the devices stay right on there Now the last thing I'll cover is Just the overall look they've given to the new ui I really like that they're coming along with it, but it still is quirky one We don't have much in here in terms of our dashboard unless you've decided to go with the unify routing equipment And I know it sounds like i'm repeating myself because I am I just don't use much of the unify routing equipment Because of all the reasons I mentioned in that previous video There's still unusual things that unify does that I don't understand They show my browser version right here that i'm running on linux. I think that's still kind of odd That's why the pingwins here. It has nothing to do with the controller. It just says i'm on controller 6.53 But i'm using linux nine six zero four six four four, which is just the browser version. So kind of strange the The dashboard though like I said is very limited right here But at least all the other stuff like the topology the unify devices things we use all the time Have just much improved in this ui I don't find myself going back and forth other than for things like locating and restarting because it's convenient But overall I think they're doing a nice job on getting all of this kind of put together in a new ui I'm still not a big fan of this though here. You can see all the wi-fi and ap groups But you go to networks. It just shows one network without the other networks in here They've just moved a lot of that around and made it a little bit more confusing And i'm not really sure why they did that because if we go here I mean you can find it. It's in there under advanced features Here's all the other networks that we have designed in the network groups and isolated groups and switchport Programming all that's in here It's just under advanced features as opposed to just networks And if you're going over to system and we'll switch back to the other interface To activate the new ui And go back over the networks. It's just under networks I don't really understand why they decided to put it under somewhere else It makes it confusing at first where you go I don't know where those things are and then you find out that they're not really hidden They're just well In a different location for some reason they thought to spread that around Now there are updates that things like threat management. Once again, it's all related to the Having a unify dream machine or any of the unify usg gateways Routing devices they've made a lot of enhancements there But like I said, that's not something I'm really going to cover in this particular video So overall my testing has gone well with it. It seems to work perfectly fine I haven't run into any real problems I will be doing an updated video of kind of a getting started with unify because I was realizing my older videos Well, they're older and your advice has made a lot of progress on the ui I think it's a solid system I haven't had really any troubles with any of the updates we did for our system But of course I run this in a virtual machine back up the entire virtual machine even before I start the update process So I have everything in a row just in case I have to regress back to the other version But after running it for about a week now, I haven't had any issues at all No scenarios came up But that's for me and hosting many different sites for my Clients that are all been set up by us and we don't have any really weird or unusual setups Or at least I don't think of them weird or unusual Those all went well I've reprovisioned and updated and changed all the settings on things no problem And you can follow and I'll leave a link down below to the Pressing process that you over at hostify because they're still slowly rolling this out among their client base as well So as long as you have a backup, which you should always have a backup even when you're not doing an update Go ahead and update it is be my opinion on this But if something goes wrong make sure you have a way to roll it back It's just the controller software So it's not like it ever blanks out sites at least this is not a problem I've ever run into when I've had updates go wrong and found a lot of bugs in them I've updated it. It'll just get into some weird configuration problems I just revert back and wait to see if there's a point release that fixes it It's usually as simple as that and also you can roll forward the updates and Block it off from internet access and log into the controller and say all right Is the controller up and running before I you know deal with any this because one thing it may do And it shouldn't disrupt any clients and no disruptions were noted at all when I did this update It may reprovision them, but it didn't restart any switches when it did that So any of the reprovisioning didn't seem to cause any issues And once I ran it for a few days is when I pushed all the firmware updates to the latest version Because on occasion there's been times where the firmware updates also require a newer version of the unify controller And you have to make sure that's all lined up. So my opinion is go ahead and update it And I'll leave links to everything I talked about down below Thanks And thank you for making it all the way to the end of this video If you've enjoyed the content, please give us a thumbs up If you would like to see more content from this channel hit the subscribe button and the bell icon If you like to hire a short project head over to laurance systems.com and click the hires button right at the top To help this channel out in other ways There's a join button here for youtube and a patreon page where your support is greatly appreciated For deals discounts and offers check out our affiliate links in the description of all our videos Including a link to our shirt store where we have a wide variety of shirts that we sell and designs come out well randomly So check back frequently and finally our forums forums.laurancesystems.com is where you can have a more in-depth discussion about this video And other tech topics covered on this channel. 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