 Welcome to The Home Lab Show, episode 34, Unify and Ubiquity Network Gear. How you doing Jay? I'm doing well, how are you? Great, we picked this as a topic because flat out, if there's one particular network gear that pops up popularly in the small home lab, it's definitely Unify. Now granted, there's other network here out there that is really popular and anything that's budget oriented is gonna be popular amongst the home lab people because it's affordable. And of course, those of you that are trying to study for Cisco, hey, buy a Cisco. I'm certainly not telling you not to buy a Cisco. And if you get Cisco certified, you pretty much the best way to do it. I know there's simulations and emulators, but the best way to do it, I think is physically hands-on with the devices. But we thought Unify is a good topic for today. So we'll dive into what you need to get started with Unify, one of the reasons it's so popular and the fact that it works so well. And maybe towards the end, we'll toss around a couple of other brands. I don't know if there are gonna be ones that we really do a deep dive into. Before we dive into it though, we do need to mention a sponsor show and that's Linode. We'd love to thank them for sponsoring this. And if you are listening to this, you downloaded it from a podcast, you download it literally from Linode servers. That's where this has been hosted now, so it's the beginning. Jay maintains all the infrastructure for the backend of the magic that happens here, the servers that run our WordPress site that have all of our podcasts on there. All that was facilitated by some fun scripting and Jay put together to get it all set up in Linode with what are we running on the backend right now? Is it OpenLightSpeed still? Yep, OpenLightSpeed, yep. OpenLightSpeed and WordPress and all that fun stuff. But we've talked about so many projects on here and we probably are gonna do a topic soon on VPNs and Linodes, one of those places. You gotta, the VPN is not something you're gonna wanna run inside your house. The whole point is to, if you wanna mask your public IP and use Linode's public IP, well, you're gonna need a cloud server and Linode has an offer code down below to get you started with that. I thank them again for sponsoring the show and yeah, check out, use the offer code down below if you wanna get started or if you wanna play with someone else's service because they don't always have to put it all in your lab. It's sometimes it needs to be someone else's lab. Make it Linode's lab. That's a good one, yeah, that's not true. Yeah, so all right, Unify. So me and Jay both run a lot of Unify gear and I have done a lot of videos on it and I have a lot more to do because it just keeps changing. That is the good and bad. For sure, last night we were playing around with the way they changed the interface and the Wi-Fi groups and sometimes they move things to their interface but I think that's any company does it. They do have a few dumb things and we'll address that. This is not to evangelize them as if they are the solution but I still think they're a good solution overall. And matter of fact, one of the things that if you work with a lot of varieties of enterprise gear that goes all the way up into the aforementioned Cisco, everything has its quirks, everything has different things you have to deal with. One of the things that's popular now is for companies to give you cloud applications to control their devices but not give you any real control over whether those applications are something you can control and there's been a couple of companies like Open Mesh that came out around the same time I remember discovering Unify and I bring them up and you may have gone, what's Open Mesh Tom, that sounds interesting. It sounds like it's some open project. Well, Open Mesh promised you a free cloud to control their devices right up until they got bought by another company and that cloud in a way and the devices were paid to keep them working or a brick. And this is actually really common in a lot of the enterprise market where all these companies come with subscriptions and this is something actively fought against with the people over at Ubiquiti and their Unify product line is not to offer subscription based services for the controller software. This is like I said, a common enterprise thing but this is what makes Unify popular in the home lab environment is no subscriptions probably one of the reasons Jay liked them. Yeah, and for me, it was the only thing that worked. It was weird because I had a, not this current house I'm living in now but previous one where I couldn't even get Wi-Fi down the hallway. Now, obviously there's something in the walls. I mean, let's be honest that there's probably no other explanation but for me personally, I just couldn't really get anything working. I bought a $400 router and that one couldn't do anything I needed it to do. I took that back to the store and bought a $150 access point, Unify access point and the whole house had Wi-Fi. I was like, whoa, I mean, that's a cheaper price and again, we're not trying to evangelize it. I'm not saying everyone should run out to get Unify but that was the situation that led me to run it just because sometimes you just use what works for you and it just happened to work for me. Yeah, and they were pretty readily available. They try to sell direct to consumer. There is some angst over the fact that they're no longer sold over Amazon and that's cause they had some real challenges. What people were doing essentially on the back end was you can buy if you're a official reseller or buying in bulk and sometimes we bought a $100,000 worth of Unify equipment at a time for large scale projects. These are sold in bulk packages and created a lot of confusion because you buy them in bulk packaging and you buy them, I think there's like, I forgot how many in each box and each grouping. So that's like a single sale. What people were doing on Amazon is breaking down these large group sales and selling them individually at different markups. This created a confusion because from ubiquity standpoint they would say we sold it to this reseller and now that reseller has decided to break these apart into individual devices. So when someone did a warranty it made it a little bit confusing because it wasn't coming from them and it wasn't intended to be sold that way. So they've really moved things a lot to direct sale. Good or bad, they've just not really sell them on Amazon as much anymore. And that's a big factor that kind of went into what that decision was, is telling people to basically don't sell it by direct. But that's one advantage you have with them is the fact that you can buy direct. Now granted supply chain shortage here in 2021 there's limited availability of some devices. That's life. I don't know what to do about it, but that's where we are. Right, here to why. Yeah, here to why. That's not a problem I'm here to solve. So if you say, but I can't get a hold of in certain name of your favorite thing you were looking for. I'm sorry, I don't know how to solve that problem and either do a lot of other people. We've got cars stacked up around here in Detroit that we can't sell because there's no chips to put in them back to the topic. The history of ubiquity is actually a little bit interesting. The CEO and some of the team used to work for Apple. So they actually have a few previous Apple people. And if you remember Apple's airport extreme, my understanding is they were some of the internal team that worked on that. But that was of course now a discontinued but was at the time a really good Wi-Fi product from Apple. And they kind of started in that marketplace. They said, hey, why don't we just rethink and do Wi-Fi differently? And Unify was really good at this of having a control system and a control plane. We'll get to more how that works later. That allows you to have a single point that controls all of the switches. The way this was always handled and still is handled by a lot of these systems is each switch has its own interface on it where you'll log into a web management. Then obviously that when you wanna set 30 switches or 30 different access points is a little bit challenging. This is where you have one central management system. Now, obviously lots of companies have decided to put that management system in the cloud and then charge you access for it. But Unify says, no, no, we wanna let you self host that controller that manages this. And so they also have a lot of other expertise in Wi-Fi in general. So they have the self host a controller that you can download, you can run on Mac, Windows and Linux and you can buy it and run it on a controller. But then they also have a few other product lines. And we're gonna focus on Unify but I will mention that they also are really talented at making affordable, very affordable site to site devices. Now, this is where there's a split. Some of these site devices are called the Ubiquiti line. Some are the Unify line. Generally speaking, things that are of the Unify brand are the ones that are going to be able to go in the controller. The ones that are of the Edge series have a different controller altogether. Now, these are all plain nice to each other but they won't show up in the same single pane of glass dashboard. And that's what I'm gonna mention, even though they have other products, not every product made under the Ubiquiti name does it. It's the subsection of mostly all the Unify devices. And they've got them all categorized under site, just one of those little things I wanted to mention. And we've used a lot of their site to site devices. They make all kinds of like, go send your internet connection miles away. The Wisp market likes a lot of their products. So they've got a lot of great projects and we've done some of them. I have a video from a few years ago now and it's still working. It's a beaming across the Detroit River. We beam internet to one of the locations because it's on an island and that's how they get connectivity and that's how it works. And that we installed that years ago and it still works today. So their devices are very reliable, very solid and they just seem to have a lot of overall expertise in the wifi field. And the Edge router equipment is nice. It's something more traditionally configured for the way you set it up with each device having a web interface, but then offering a separate central management. I still think the Edge stuff's good and a lot of people really like the Edge equipment. Some people like it better because it has a very interactive CLI. And hey, that's great. If you want to get advanced, the Edge routers have that and the Edge switches have that. But let's swing it back over here to Unify but one more side note of Unify video and I've talked about that. So that's where there's a little bit of controversy and I'm expecting a few angry comments on this. The first iterations of Unify video where self-hosted, I thought this was amazing. Finally, a company letting me build my own hardware, giving me the controller for free. It was locked into their cameras and then I can start building Unify camera systems. We were excited, we built them. Then we started doing more consulting on them and we realized the same problem that ubiquity was having. People were complaining about it because they would underspec a machine, they would build an inadequate amount of hardware assembled to run this and it would cause a real problem. So eventually ubiquity decided to abandon that whole project and this is where the anger and the pitchforks came out because people were vested in it and now they switched it over to the newer Unify protect is what it's called now but that's their Unify protects the thumbs which are a little bit different. So they did have that and they're still popular among home users. What do you think of your Unify protect system? I really like it. There's one thing that annoys me to no end that I'll get into but aside from that one problem, I mean, it's just kind of cool to have all the devices in one interface. Well, technically it's kind of like two interfaces because even though it's one controller, there's like two completely different sections for protect and for the network gear. So I really do like that. I like the fact that the camera is cheap. It's like 29 US dollars for the one that I use which is more than enough for me when I can buy it which I can't buy anymore right now. I've been trying for months, supply shortages like we're saying nothing we can do about that. The only thing that is kind of annoying is that the, when you have to put in the second factor code every now and then to get into the interface. I mean, I think that's a good thing because I like that security but when someone is knocking on my door and I really want to tell them to go away and I can't because I have to put in the code and by the time I get the code in the second factor code in there they've already walked away. That's a little awkward when someone's at your door and it just happens to be the time where your cookie times out and you have to reauthenticate and everything. Aside from that problem, I really do think it's pretty cool. Yeah, so I think it's nice that they have that as a system we sold a lot of them. One of the things I will say for the Unify system is hands down, mobile app and things like that, I've seen people call them kind of abolition. I'm like, well, yeah, some of the people came from Apple. They have a really nice design aesthetic and it's easy to use. You set the cameras up, they adopt easily. I won't get too far down that rabbit hole but I think overall it's not a bad system. It doesn't scale to some of the larger commercial systems but back to the HomeLab show here. It seems to be great and popular among the HomeLab people who go, hey, I want a doorbell. I want a local recording and I want a couple of cameras around the house and I don't want it to send it out to some cloud service that can spy on me or see it, AKA ring and things like that. Those are the ring spy cams. A lot of people are a little upset about that because we found out they will share data with places. So anyways, not to get too off topic. We do the Unify videos nice but the Unify video doesn't actually tie right into it. So let's get into the actual Unify network gear itself and what you can do with it and why it's so popular. Once you get into the Unify line and you figure out the Unify controller and the Unify controller, as I said, runs Windows, Mac, Linux and it does not, despite what somebody said in some forum which is always how conversations start but someone said in the forum you have to have it running all the time in order for my Unify equipment to work. Nope, a lot of times people do this. You can spin it up on your laptop and fired up go configure your Unify equipment and turn the software off. The software's only needed if you wanna collect statistics and when you wanna make changes. None of the Unify gear itself has any local interfaces for you to push changes to it. It ties all to the controller and then it's where it gets the cues from to make changes or send statistics. The only thing that does actively run on the controller is if you set up a guest Wi-Fi with a captive portal the captive portal redirection actually does go to the controller. So that doesn't need to be on if you're running a guest Wi-Fi that also needs at the same time the captive portal for some type of authentication. That's it. Other than that, you can just turn it off. It doesn't have to run. Now the advantage of leaving it running well, one statistics information whether or not your switches are online you can go through the history of things you can also have it gather more data you can set up syslog you can set up lots of other features that all pull through the Unify software. You can also go in there and do little things like have it set up to have a notification if there's a port change or some type of status change on there. So there's a constant telemetry going back and forth through to the controller and you. Now this kind of brings you back to do you need the controller hosted locally or do you need it hosted remotely? Oh, and I see someone in the comments. Yes, you can also schedule automatic firmware updates because no one ever wants to do firmware updates especially when you manage oh, I don't know several hundred switches or several hundred access points you can schedule all the firmware updates with it on as well and push them out automatically and we set these up for clients all the time and we even host the controller for a lot of our clients. Now hosting the controller is something else that makes them an interesting market for both the homelab people and for a lot of the business people like myself the controller can be hosted in the cloud or hosted in your rack in your cloud it doesn't have to be at the same location as the devices and it does not have to only talk to it over a VPN they have an encrypted transport layer they have ways you can set up port forwarding so you can host the controller in a place and I'll use an example because we've referred to them a lot as Hostify Hostify is one of the companies that offers a platform for hosting the controller and help manage and set it up for you so you'll maintain the controller software another option is Linode we have an offer code down below and you can spin the controller up in Linode when you spin it up in Linode you can then tie all your sites together maybe you have just your homelab you wanna manage but maybe you also have some friends and a lot more friends or maybe even businesses that you wanna manage and you can tie a single instance of the controller to many different sites and it keeps them all separate this is really nice so you are able to take the controller and have a one to many relationship so you can have a single controller that controls and for our example we have all of our different managed clients in that one controller that are using the Unify equipment and this can even be in your homelab environment you can set it up so you manage your parents house you're like I said friends and family and once you have a number of devices in that controller let's say I've got 20 access points at this particular location another 20 at a completely different location each of these are 100% individualized from each other or you can have this location split apart but still use the same control plane for both of them we actually have a client that has multiple locations and we can put them together like that this allows you to set seamless Wi-Fi for the multiple locations as well a couple different diversity options you can do there the opposite doesn't happen once a group of Unify switches and access points are controlled by a controller you cannot have another controller talking to them it doesn't work in reverse so there's not a way for me to have a controller at my site that manages the site and then that particular client to also have a controller that manages them at the same time they adopt to and create an encryption pair for each controller they're talking to you can pass them to another controller so you can host it yourself but if someone says I'd like all this equipment migrated to another controller we can certainly migrate it over to another controller so these are all different easy ways you can set that up and do it now this is where I will take the wrath and hate of people and I did a video should you buy a Unify dream machine and it is a video I was referenced down below the Unify routing equipment in general I talked about the dream machine the USG USG Pro and of course this does include things that may be in their beta market the up and coming devices that they're coming out with for routing still don't solve some real fundamental headaches with the way Unify builds routing equipment they just have to me some goofy ways they've done things they do not give you a lot of robust features for a firewall are they secure? Sure, they work they will route traffic they will not have any ports open by default so they follow some good general guidelines there what they don't do though is offer you a lot of diversity and I know a lot of the people who are listening to the home lab show are gonna go but I really want a whole home VPN set up with selective routing I need this group of IPs on my network or even this whole network or this one VLAN to automatically go and transfer over this particular VPN so you know, it may have policy routing and things like that Unify doesn't make any of that easy and someone always likes to point out but you can do it Tom, it's just not documented there's a project I found on GitHub that allows you to side load extra things on there and get it working but that's not exactly the answer I mean maybe if you just wanna hack it up and do go ahead but for what you're paying it seems like this should be some officially supported because the problem is once you start side loading and modifying it anytime there's an update it frequently breaks or becomes incompatible with the extra things that were unofficial so it's kind of at your own risk and some people, yeah, that can be a problem I love the Unify switches and access points I'm just not a fan of any of the USG, USG Pro Unify Dream Machine or Dream Machine Pro for anyone who may have a more advanced and I just need to route some networks and create a couple of segmentations that's kind of my feelings on it do you have any other thoughts playing with it Jay here? Yeah, I have a few so going back to what you said about managing families networks I was thinking that and you stole it right out of my brain because I feel like it's the thing it's pretty much the unspoken home lab thing like we all, I'm not gonna say all but I'm assuming most of us we support friends and families, computers and networks because we're the person that they go to for that kind of thing and if you had family on the same system as you or similar one, you could have one controller and just flip over to their house, fix theirs flip back to yours, fix yours that's really cool. Now going back to the USG and things like that I totally agree, I mean, I use PF Sense which I've mentioned before and yeah, PF Sense is not gonna integrate like to the point where if you push out a VLAN in Unify that VLAN is gonna be on PF Sense but other than that, they really work well together because I just create the VLAN in PF Sense create the same one in Unify and everything just magically works so I don't even see myself getting away from PF Sense because it just has so many darn features it's just like, it has everything in there probably to a fall like so many things I'll never need but if I ever do need anything, it's in the interface but since it's using standard networking protocols it all just works together very well. Yeah, and that's one of the things that I wanna reiterate here is you can mix and match the equipment Unify is following standards for things like VLANs this is well documented so if you use a PF Sense, you use Open Sense you use Edge, you use Untangle in certain name, we've seen 48 I'm not a big fan of Sonic Wall and we have noticed Sonic Wall in particular there's some type of fight I think it's been solved with some firmware but I'll bring it up that Sonic Wall, DHCP and certain Unify access points seem to be at war with each other you can statically assign things on there if you Google Sonic Wall, DHCP, Unify you can spend some time in a forums diving into it but for the most part 99% of the time in PF Sense being one of my big go-tos there's no issues at all mix and matching equipment on there provides you're also using switches that are VLAN aware you can even put Cisco's in between matter of fact, we have a lot of integrations we just did one the other day where they had a bunch of Cisco gear but they wanted some of the really the newer Unify 25 gig switches because the Cisco 25 gig switches are well substantially more expensive so they picked up some Unify ones and it integrated into their Cisco environment once we matched all the VLANs perfectly fine so now they have 25 gig where they want it with the new Unify Aggregation Switch Pro and the rest of it is the same Cisco that they've always had so no big deal so you can absolutely mix and match on that that's perfectly fine downside is what Jay mentioned it requires a little bit more thought planning when you're using the Unify and I define a VLAN this is one of the things that makes Unify so easy to use they use really simple methodologies to doing it I don't know why Unify to me I think Unify is probably one of the first companies I've ever seen pull this off at the scale they have when I want to create a VLAN let's say I have 50 separate switches across a network it can be one, it can be 50 but the point is I have to define a VLAN I want to hit VLAN tag 50 I have to then assign that to all of the switches there's other companies that have methodologies for doing this but unfortunately they've made it a little convoluted compared to the way Unify does it I go into the Unify system I define the VLAN inside their dashboard it pushes that VLAN information to all the switches right away simultaneously it provisions them and then I can go to any port on any switch and I can name that port instead of VLAN 50 maybe it's my camera VLAN so I'll name it camera and I can just go to the port and a little pull down menu really nice in the UI just goes through and hit a button and boom I've now assigned port 12 on switch 12 to be this and then I can go to another maybe another IDF that has port 13 needs to be VLAN 50 they'll pull down on there and assign it they've made it really, really simple to do there's no good universal standard when you look at web interfaces for configuring VLANs on switches one of my videos I've been wanting to work on is to show like four different switch manufacturers and show how there are similarities but each one has their own nuance for how you tag and untag ports that's I think a good available thing to learn if you wanna dive deeper into how VLANs is and what a tagged untagged and trunk port is but when it comes to Unify they actually simplify it they're doing that in the back end they just put a really cool UI that you can choose a port and say all which is Unify for the word trunk so a trunk port is just the all setting Unify or the tagged port or isolated ports and you can just pull downs and a UI and click it and it automatically does all the other assignment for you this is what makes it really nice but kind of as Jay mentioned you're defining all this in Unify so if you also want these VLANs to work in PF sense you can define them in PF sense make sure you're defining you define VLAN tag 50 in PF sense then you define it in Unify the one advantage you get though if you do use Unify routing equipment is it'll define it in that same interface and talk to the routing equipment as well but back to the shortcomings of the route for that being an advantage I think there's more shortcomings to the Unify routing equipment than that particular that particular thing there so that's where it gets a little bit tricky and I was waiting for this question to come up in the chat but definitely something I will bring up no you can't use the Unify controller software to monitor or edit the non-Unify equipment it only works as a dashboard for Unify equipment it does not work for the dashboard for the other miscellaneous devices that are not compatible on there so that's definitely a very frequent question that comes up anytime I do a Unify video Yeah, on the opposite end of that it's like if you don't have the USG and you click on something in the Unify interface that requires that they won't hesitate to say by the way if you had the USG this section would be active and you could actually change things here but until then, no, you can't have it but they'll let you click on it and see some of the things that could be there if you did buy one kind of almost like they're passively shaming you for not having one but every time I look at a video about the USG I just look at it as well doesn't seem to have all the features that PF Sense has so I just can't go that direction but then everything else is great because I create a VLAN in Unify in the interface and then every switch, every access point they just all update, they get that one change it just makes things so much easier Yeah, it certainly takes a lot of the confusion out of setting up all the VLANs and a tagging across networks and it kind of grows on you because they have some really inexpensive switches they have the little 5.1 that's PoE powered that's clever they have something that I think that one's like $30 or so, $30, $35 so if you just have one port and you're like, I need a couple more here I want to put in, no problem if you need one of the InWall HDs the InWall is rather clever you can take a standard style RJ45 plug style box and mount what is a four port plus Wi-Fi in a single room this is actually in my home office so I have Wi-Fi in my home office with four ports at the ready for me to plug into and I have Wi-Fi in that particular area the anytime you're planning Wi-Fi this becomes really tricky I don't know what's in your walls so when people ask me, hey, what should I get for my house? I don't know what's in your walls is my reply I don't have an easy answer line of sight is always gonna give you the best performance for Wi-Fi everything in between is well something in between you and a radio frequency so there can be a little bit challenges and what is in your walls or what are not that frequency passes through smoothly or degrades dramatically so yeah, that's a little bit harder to plan but if you plan for smaller Wi-Fi devices such as in wall HD matter of fact, I just talked to someone about doing this in a hotel they are going to put one in each room we've seen this planned out a few times in dorms and hotels where they run around to go one single Wi-Fi device with a couple ports those ports can be trunked in V-Land so they don't necessarily have access to the greater network and this is some great scenarios they have on there they do have 10 gig switches they do have 25 gig switches now they're a unified aggregation pro I've reviewed all of these on my channel they have industrial switches that are made for a little bit harsher environments so there's a wide variety on there and the nice thing is when I define or want to define different ports in V-Lands and any of these it's kind of universally the same it's pretty much go in there it gives me a display of all the ports it's even got a cool mapping thing on there now back to what Jay said they do kind of shame you though for not using theirs there's a few areas that just end up blank and one of them is the statistics it tells you you're not gonna get any of these deep analytics but hopefully you didn't run out and buy a USG because you're missing that because you'll learn the fact that they still here in 2021 don't offer time slicing that is a critical thing I need to know in order to make those statistics mean anything and that's one of the things I covered in my video whether or not you should get a unified router is here's a cool statistic it says Jay you use 10 gigs worth of YouTube and what's the next question you're gonna ask is like when, right? Yeah, yeah When? It since when, since it started collecting stats since the last day or two it's really vague on how they do their time slicing they don't let you get granular on the details of it they give you this really cool round dashboard little pie charts and circle charts that get everyone excited but for people who actually need a really good detailed like I need to know exactly who's using bandwidth when they're doing it over time I need some granular net flow style data unified just falls on his face for that it's like, well, we got this pretty graph that probably makes some manager think it does something in it certainly does a lot for our marketing team who can sell it but it's not actionable intelligence unfortunately so even though they're shaming you for not having it they're also, when you do have it you're like, oh, that just made the pretty graph it didn't help me any That didn't help much but if you pair it with something like smoke ping you get some pretty decent information out of there smoke ping doesn't care what your equipment is so it's not unified specific it's one of the things that I recommend pretty much everyone check out in their home lab because it's just fun to kind of get these metrics and graphs for the various end points in your network which I would favor that over unifies any day of the week Yeah, there's better ways to get statistics on there if you play around with different tools like a concoct net flow data set up port mirrors to have something else that actually does better traffic analysis there's other ways you can get that data in a more meaningful way or even different firewalls I've reviewed untangled firewalls before which by the way we're fine with Unify I've certainly tested many of them untangled has really cool statistics reporting and that helps out quite a bit because all the data flows through your firewall so the firewalls a better place for it but it actually you need a firewall that can do really good statistics reporting and like I said that's where the USG and the Unified Dream Machine falls short and someone already asked what about the Unified Dream Machine Pro or whatever the next version is that's in beta no it's still got the same shortcomings actually one thing I did mention because I can't remember if this feature is out but depends on when you're listening to this one thing I didn't like at all about the way they were doing the Dream Machine and this has been well documented and certainly cause a lot of anger amongst the Unified community is they decided at some point to force you to register your Unified Dream Machine device before you activate it I greatly dislike companies that force registration of things and by the way it's not their other equipment it's just their Dream Machine routers that they decided to do this on and of course some of their video equipment but I don't know what made uninspired to do this but they do have a upcoming feature as they do it is not forcing you to register with their cloud application I don't know why they force registration any company that does this feel as much as they preach to be not the lock-in company this is one of the other reasons I'm very critical of some of their routing equipment and I don't know how do you feel about companies that force you to activate to turn on? I don't like that at all I mean I also have some reservations about having to use their controller and I think a lot of people have that problem too but I'm willing, I mean it's so useful and it works so well that I'm okay with it in this case but I feel like when you go to that extent then that's just going a bit too far. Yeah, it's kind of a weird so when you get like a Unified Dream Machine router it isn't just a router the Unified Dream Machine is cool because I'll say this is a neat feature you get the option to run Protect on it you get the option to also run the controller on it and your routing function so it becomes a very nice all in one place where everything is the controller is living on the system there but the force registration is just to me unnecessary and it's so they can gather who activated them and things like that but of course once you start talking force registration you're also talking about the company if they ever decide to turn off those activation servers then it doesn't activate anymore and then your product can never be set up again so those little things like that are annoyances but this does not affect the Unified Controller software itself you can download this it does not require a registration to download the download link is open and free you can even set this up I do prefer running the controller on Linux you can set this up as a repository so when you apt-get update it will apt-get pull the newer versions of the controller hold off on that because just because they released a new controller today it is up to you you HomeLab enthusiasts whether or not you wanna be the people running the bleeding edge I'm always fine running the bleeding edge but I get a lot of people that comment can let me know if it's okay to run the bleeding edge because some updates go really smooth but I think the last one went really well but a couple updates ago well they had an update and a week later they had an update and a week later they had an update and each one were incremental things kind of those whoops we forgot something whoops we didn't realize too many people had these use cases so sometimes things can go a little bit dicey when there's major version upgrades but other than not having the controller auto update it's been the last couple versions they seem to have got a little bit better on their QA and some of that I don't think you ever experienced any of that Jay did you have any controller update issues? Yes I did but not anymore so what was the name of that original controller they had before like the dream machine and all that Oh the Cloud Key Yeah that I had problems with that where for those that don't know first of all the Cloud Key was a completely optional device that you could purchase if you didn't want to run a VM for the controller software or run it on your laptop and you wanted a dedicated place to do it I like putting it on a virtual machine because the controller software being on a virtual machine means your VM software hopefully has snapshot setup on top of the backups the controller itself has so you have a lot of wiggle room to go back but that when I was using that Cloud Key it would just like every month lose everything it just would stop working and I'd have to redo it and I never understood why and other people had that problem too I have their newest generation Cloud Key and I've never had an issue with it ever since for probably over a year now and I think around that same time period my son came to me and told me that his PS4 wouldn't connect to the Wi-Fi anymore and I kept trying and trying and okay everything else in the house works this one doesn't I gave him a power line adapter as a temporary fix and then two months later he tells me yeah the Wi-Fi is working again and I look at Unify and it updated oh the firmware updated it had something wrong with the PS4 but those issues were quite a while ago I think like you were saying the QA has gone up and I've not had any problems lately so they must be doing something right now compared to back then Yeah the controller software that they were running on the original Cloud Key not the Cloud Key Gen 2s was really I don't think the hardware was really up to the task quickly became a problem it had heating issues it didn't like being in warm environments and I said warm not hot so it definitely we didn't really install that many of them but we did a lot of consulting where people had problems with them and we always went for hosting them ourselves so we kind of avoided all that self-hosting the controller is probably to be the best thing to do the second best thing is to run it on one of the Cloud Key Gen 2s Cloud Key Gen 2s is a lot more stable of a product but self-hosting it yourself just kind of I don't know I like hosting things myself I think most of the audience is nodding in agreement yeah I just want to host the controller I want to maintain it and what we do before we do the updates is I of course like it's a virtual machine so I snapshot it run the controller update see if the controller update didn't break and if it looks good I will slowly turn it on by filtering by P's or even usually we test our local equipment first instead of our external client equipment because we have our equipment in the same controller I'll see if any of our equipment has a problem after the configuration updates if it works good then we can just go ahead and open it up back to our clients and start going forward I like being able to do this because that way I can just roll it backwards roll it forwards and set it up they also do have and I highly recommend doing this they have some auto backup options to create file backups on the local controller itself and then you can use whatever scripting you want to get those files backed up somewhere else along with doing full virtual machine backups of it so to me the self hosting in your own dedicated VM it doesn't take a ton of resources it does scale a little bit up when you start talking about having 300 or 400 devices access points and switches on there but it's still not using that much memory it's I don't know I think we probably have eight or 12 gigs of RAM assigned to ours actually I should look real quick it's not substantial as well I understand what is in mind right now I do have a just because I have a lot of memory I've got 16 gigs assigned to it it's using 11 gigs and we're hosting I think 60 something different clients separate sites inside the controller so in a multitude of devices and connections it just doesn't it all depends on quantity of devices but as it scales up you put a little more memory to it and it works really well yep all right now alternatives is one of the other things I thought I'd mentioned here so I've you know waxed on about whole Unify but as I'm not trying to evangelize it I'm so critical of the routers I think it's still a nice platform to get started on but what about what's that company called TP-Link and their OMADA system TP-Link OMADA I did a review on it I think TP-Link OMADA is interesting they basically just copy pasted Unify I mean like I was actually shocked how much like someone just copied all the features of Unify pretty much and just pasted them into the OMADA controller it is one of the hardcore ripoffs I've ever seen except they copied the same problems with the routing equipment this is just weird to me that they did this I'm just a little confused by it I also don't have the same level of confidence that TP-Link OMADA if you're going to just copy paste with no innovation and not even fix anything what's your real commitment overall to the product line TP-Link doesn't have as much variety of product I don't see them innovating as much on that they seem to make stuff that people are happy with if you want to run the TP-Link OMADA feel free their documentation was well not great I commented that in my review so I did review it and I tested it and it seemed to route it seemed to function my review is positive in terms of its functionality I don't know about its long term also the way they host the controller a lot more confusing on some of the setup and way less documentation on that that took a lot of poking through and just figuring out how much they made it look like Unify so I'm not completely sold on a TP-Link OMADA but I think for small setups it works fine I'm not I couldn't find anyone that told me that they had a huge setup or at least not a lot of the business owners I mean that oh yeah we deployed 300 of these at a site so I don't know about the scalability of it but it's out there and you know they make some equipment on it a few other companies MakerTik obviously MakerTik I've reviewed their small 10 gig device hands down you can't touch it for the price actually that's true for a lot of the MakerTik stuff the downside is and this joke has been reiterated many times in the forums well we just call it Latvia logic this is the weird way you do things you will end up with some strange commands that you may have to type to get something to work in there you'll not even be sure what they do you'll find them repeated in several forums and you're like I don't know I copy paste this and it gets it working there's some quirkiness to it there's a learning curve that's much much steeper for the MakerTik doesn't mean it's a bad product it means you have to deal with the steeper learning curve to get something done so it's still not a terrible choice they seem to make a reasonably reliable piece of equipment out there I've never really tested their Wi-Fi I've heard mixed things I've heard people tell me it's awesome I've heard people tell me it's terrible I've never really dove much into their Wi-Fi so MakerTik seems to be mostly limited to the Switch I do know some larger Wisp companies we've talked to the wireless internet search fighters that really like the MakerTik stuff and Serve the Home has done quite a few videos on it as well they seem to be reviewed overall positively we haven't really run to many problems when we see it in the field we'll see it as some type of maybe core controller we even have one client that's got some MakerTik stuff makes us to unify stuff everything seems to work perfectly fine so I don't think they're a terrible alternative out there oh what else I'm looking at a few other people the comments they have oh Ingenious you know Ingenious has been working on some cloud controller stuff I don't really know where they are with that it's been a while since I dug into it their cloud controller type stuff was not great I've seen a lot of other companies try to tell me they're working on cloud controllers but I haven't really got besides TP-Link Omata I've never really stopped and dove into and tested it I have tested for example Aruba which once again is owned by HP and offers the free cloud controller and back to free is still running somewhere until it's not now Aruba a lot of their devices at least have the advantage of being able to be locally managed matter of fact one thing I will say and this is something I commented on my Aruba review it's better to manage them locally because the interface even now today for Aruba is less than wonderful for their web interface and not very full of features pretty much any advanced features you have to go back and log in and switch it from cloud management to local management to get the features you're looking for so at least it has it and Aruba just suffered a big breach so that's also something to keep in mind that obviously caused some drama the cloud system externally gets breached and now you have one more thing on your liabilities plate of externally hosted controllers that now you have to do a disclosure of what was breached so yeah I haven't dug into the details of it but here in November of 2021 I know that was announced does Unify talk Ansible? I seen that in the comments here no you can't really that I'm aware of I've not really dove into it there's any way to do scaled infrastructure changes by their interface that way like where you send either API commands or anything like that you could get into the Unify config and change it on individual devices but the controller rewrites that config each time and it's building a config out of the database that runs on the controller so I don't think there's any easy way to issue commands at least that I'm aware of other than using the Unify controller and I've had people tell me they wanna reinvent the Unify controller in Anvil and I'm like why? It already exists if you're gonna take the time to use something like Ansible and beside to script all of your switch configs that's fine probably go with something else use a Cisco use a Mikrotik something that's designed to have you SSH in and manage all the configurations from a command line to Activium that's something that if you're gonna go through all that trouble why go with Unify at that point? You're not gonna bother using a pretty interface you're just gonna start scripting it I then you advise maybe not the best choice for that I'm not sure I see a benefit because you could I mean it's not like you're provisioning and reprovisioning to the point where you're having a high device turnaround where Ansible is gonna help it's like you get everything the way you want it you back up the config worst case scenario you just re-import the config again and that'll just be a lot easier than creating a playbook in my opinion Yeah, I mean I've seen people have configs but they that they'll push for switches out in the field you know you get a backup of the config but the switches provided life goes well they don't fail too often even my friends who work at companies that manage like a thousand two thousand plus switches for you know across their environment it's not like there's a failure every day they make sure they have all those switches and each one of those individual switches backed up and you can do this in Unify in a really easy way because if the Unify switch fails you can copy the config to the new switch you're bringing in so all those port assignments and everything else can be assigned to the switch you replace it with they have methodologies to do that in Unify and that's actually done through a UI you don't have to do it from the command line and actually push config files so there's some relatively easy ways to do it yep but I think that pretty much covers it I see people mentioning the ubiquity edge equipment can be done in Ansible yeah the ubiquity go back to the edge equipment you can SSH in those are CLI managed we're capable of CLI management and yeah you can certainly do all kinds of configurations and changes both their switches and the edge routers now the edge routers I mentioned like on Tangle PF Sense being two really popular ones I like the edge routers not a big fan of them back for the same reasons of the Unify routers there's just not extensive features they're not terrible they have more features than the Unify but they're also well very command line driven to get things done sometimes to a fault where you have to do more than you probably should through a command line instead of through a documented interface so yeah and the same thing with the policy routing of VPN way overly complicated or not possible other than yes some GitHub project allows you to sideload extra things onto your edge router but back to not really support it so hopefully this gave you a little bit of idea of some of the Unify stuff what do you think Jay? I think so and there's so many features to talk about that I just don't think we could ever get through them all I mean one thing I will mention real quick is I like having the ability to throttle different networks so I don't have to worry about my kids stealing all my megabits basically is limit them to like 50 or whatever for their online games and then limit per device to 80 or 100 or something like that so I don't have to worry about one device that's totally saturating everything and there's so many more features that again we won't have time to talk about all of them but yeah it's a really cool system it's not for everybody but it works very well for me so I'm satisfied with it and if nothing else is something to look into yeah two little things if you get some of these like Unify Dream Machine I believe now supports the Unify door access I'm not sold on the door access system I reviewed it I don't think Unify liked my review of it I know a few people have called out whether or not they've been safety certified so whether or not they've there's some validation when you start getting into door access controls there are at least here in the United States some safety protocols should be followed I am fuzzy I'm where Unify stands on some of that based on what I've talked to people that work in that industry and the Unify they do have a talk product as in a VoIP product they had a VoIP product before that was abandoned because it was so bad I'm less than clear on their strategy to go to market with the new one I'm not enough to sell that to any clients so not on my to-do list to test it I'll wait and see if it becomes a popular product but we don't really see a big demand for it I don't have the utmost faith in there I really stick to their access points and switches that's their bread and butter that's what they sell the most of that stuff is solid well-proven technology that they keep making more of and I think they don't want to be one-trick pony so they dive into other areas and maybe good or bad they dive into other areas Unify cloud gaming console coming soon well they had for a little while they meant they had what do you call that the little life cam because if you look at the door access and you look up I think it was called like the life cam there's some digging and I think I referenced it when I did the video on they actually reuse they had some other idea to create these cameras you hung around your neck like action cameras so Unify's actually dove into a lot of different things these things are very profitable on their main core product that's allowed them the latitude to go over and start trying other things I don't blame companies for trying things hey why not it's interesting maybe they have a product that comes out of it maybe they waste a lot of money they're Unify like smart plugs and smart bulbs yet yeah they actually I think they abandoned it but they were in the solar lighting business they were in the light business as well some type of light controllers I've never really played or looked into it I don't know if it's still a supported product or not I can't answer that honestly so I'm thinking that if not like I'm just so surprised that they don't have a whole unified line of smart plugs and all the things because it's like they're doing everything else so I think they do have unofficially in beta some stuff that they're working on they do have what they call a beta store you're not supposed to review or talk about it but if you checked their beta store they got stuff anyone can check it you just check a box it agrees not to review it so yeah it is what it is I do have reviews of many of the switches I've talked about I've done a review of meeker tick I've done a review of meeker tick switch os I've done a review of tp link omata I've done lots of reviews of unify and all the firewalls I mentioned so you search my channel you'll find all that stuff on my youtube channel there's a wide variety of things on there like I said I'm I'm not evangelizing them I think they're a good choice I think they're a solid choice for people that want to manage things very easily and if you you know want to be able to learn v-lands in a more detailed way unify kind of obscures it from you but the other side is unify obscures it from you so you don't have to learn v-lands in a very detailed way to assign port assignments because maybe you just want to get to work and so there's good and bad with it but overall I uh I think it's a pretty cool product and I still recommend it we still buy and we still use and we still deploy them so yep I just want to make sure we laid it all out there for you so all right thank you very much for joining us so and uh yeah obviously you can figure out where to find I see someone so where do you get the ea store just google that I mean google early access unifying land on it all right thanks