 Tom here from Warren Systems and Unify has released their updated controller version 6.4.54 a few days ago and good news it's boring. So today is September 22nd 2021 and I've been running it for a little bit and nothing happened which is exactly what I want it just worked. So I can't say nothing happened it actually functioned but nothing is exciting as the 6.2 series where there were like a release every week to fix a bug or fix some type of leaking memory problem that was causing some drama. This update seems to have gone smooth and my server after running it for several days didn't crash. I also reached out to Riley Chase over at Hostify and this is his cool fancy dashboard and Riley runs way more Unify servers than anyone I know currently he has 1,943 of them. He's currently has most of them live on 6.26 and that was the version if you recall there were several small incremental releases to fix all kinds of little quirkiness of getting it to work right. That didn't seem to happen and Riley confirmed this so far the rollout and the testing has gone well for version 6.54. I know it's a lot of people ask and they you know tweet at me, tweet at Riley, tweet at Chris over at Costock Solutions who covers this as well but it's good that yes the update has gone fairly smooth so far but I will cover some of the changes some of the UI things that were modified I think looked nicer and still some of the pain things that are well everything to do with that new UI and I'm not sure why they just keep kind of incrementally putting some things in new UI and leaving some things in the old UI and not just going one or the other so we have to go back and forth because that doesn't make it easier. Good news is there's really not much you have to do in the new UI there's only maybe a few things you may have to go but for the most part everything works in the old UI well enough that you can do the day to day management. I'm still really puzzled by doing that but before I hit too off topic if you'd like to learn more about me and my company head over to LawrenceSystems.com if you'd like to hire a short project including unified consulting or network design there is a hires button right at the top. If you want to support this channel in other ways there's affiliate links down below to get your deals and discounts on products and services we talk about on channel. Among those products and services if you don't like dealing with updates that's what Riley's good at that's what hostify is good at and hostify will take care of all those updates for you they do manage controllers on there I do have an offer code for hostify down below. All right on to the changes this is their official page for the Unify network application they don't call it the Unify network software defined controller anymore so kind of interesting that little bit of name change and actually down here is something funny it's not called beta we call it Unify Labs now little minor changes on here and actually that's good news there's just a lot of little minor changes in here when they say improvements I don't really think that's too big of a deal and it's kind of nice just to have an update that has a lot of bug fixes in it without any major changes that are sweeping and break a lot of different things but one of the things I will cover right off the top is the first one they have it's called add optimize IOT Wi-Fi connectivity field for Wi-Fi configuration and this is kind of the problem sometimes with Unify updates is they're not clear on what they're doing because there are two different forum posts here that I'll leave links to what does optimize IOT Wi-Fi connectivity actually do and yeah there's not a bunch of responses from Unify clarifying what that does now there is responses of what changes in there and actually let's look at that actual change and let's show you how that change conflicts with this change over here updated defaults DTM period from 1 or 2 1 for 2.4 gigahertz now the transmission period is what they're talking about that's what people figured out that it does on the DTM transfer but if you actually want to go in here and we'll look at the settings I'm on the new UI and we're going to go ahead and add a new Wi-Fi network if you go to advanced we can see that the optimize IOT for Wi-Fi connectivity is there and this is where things get a little bit confusing because that doesn't exist if I would have done this in the old UI and the DTM if you look is set to one automatically so why do I need to check that box if it's set there automatically a little bit confusing so maybe you will get some clarification later you maybe will come up with a page that actually has a write up for what that does but for now we're kind of left just guessing as what it does now a lot of these things here I'm going to skip over because we don't use with our clients any usgs or unified dream machines we do consulting and we know people who have them but it's not something that we actively deploy to any clients we manage so I'm not really going to dive deep into any of the different udm udm pro or usg changes that are on here there are some changes on here but it's not a product we really recommend some people have asked me it's time you're kind of bashing on it and I like it's not about bashing it's about being honest that the product itself is very simple and doesn't have a ton of advanced use cases so if you are a more advanced user you will find that the routing equipment from unify is not all that great if you are a home user it is probably substantially better than what you may find off the shelf at some big box store but that's kind of how I look at these so that's something we use a lot and the same thing because Riley Chase does hostify and host unify controllers if you are using a dream machine you have to use the controller on like a dream machine so his knowledge comes from the same as mine managing the devices themselves for the switching and access points but not so much with the different routing equipment so they do have they do have a lot of fixes on the routing which is nice and things like improving when failover notification improve application startup stability that probably has more to do with stability issues I've seen people complaining about an error because honestly startup has not been an issue for a long time in terms of the unify controller right I think the last time I had started problems was probably long before version five so I'm assuming that's where that's at because I know some people had to reload some of their dream machines to get that working properly just from consulting we've done on helping people that improve dashboard drop-down styling for smaller screens I think this is something that confused me and let's show you what happens when we're looking at a device if we go over here to the unify devices and let's take a switch right here like the studio switch and we go here to settings and I want to modify a port I was confused and the scroll bar is just kind of tiny to me and it doesn't display much it's got this kind of narrow view let me show you what that view is on there so first I was like oh why can't I see my other networks are they just missing no I can scroll wheel or grab the tiny little scroll and go but if we go back over to the classic UI that's handled differently so go here classic settings yeah deactivate this ugly interface that is not complete go here and then grab any switch click on a port and we want to edit a port and look at that same pull down it's got all my ports in there I don't know how they thought that was better not giving me I mean I guess if you were doing this on a really small screen I was managing my unify controller and logging in from a phone I would like that on there but that's what things like responsive design solve having a single UI that's responsive to the different screen sizes it's not it didn't help me at all because it's a little bit confusing I like to be able to have all these different pull downs right here so I think this looks better and is easier to do still on the old UI but hey they have this idea of the new UI also if you notice when I'm in the old UI these are still pop outs so I can move them around which makes it really handy if you want to take like this switch and another switch these two aren't the same but you get the idea and do some comparisons like where ports are on two switches and some side by side we jump back over to the new UI use your interface go ahead and apply some changes let's go back over to the devices and uh nope doesn't seem to be able to pop that out this sits here so what happens when you open up another one or another one or another one it just switches between them and doesn't let me go through and pop these out as windows like I said this is some of those trying to push that new UI but it it doesn't even have some of the features of the old UI type thing that makes life easy scrolling down through here these are all little things they did hide the speed test for WAN 2 I don't know that's really a feature improvement seems like someone might want that on there um but hey these are some of the things on there and I've never been a big fan of their way they do the dashboard itself matter of fact let's go back and look at that dashboard because when you're here and we go back over to the dashboard here there's something a little confusing in the top corner this is actually something Riley pointed out to me and I tested it here I assumed when I seen network version 454 with linux 9409 I'm like huh that's odd it's running linux but where does it pull that number for oh wait I'm on chrome version 94 um then I realized with Riley when he sent me a screenshot he was doing it on a mac it shows a mac os there and uh we tried it here in a windows machine at the office and it shows the windows os here for some reason they pull the user agent that you're using and put that in a corner and I don't know why I really don't like this uh interface much I don't get it I don't understand what they're trying to achieve here it's not near as intuitive easy to use as when we go back to the normal interface so get rid of and deactivate go back to our dashboard here hey look we have things that look a little bit better matter of fact I added some of those new features they had like the wi-fi interference or here's your port uh passive 24 volt we have two of them uh we have 37 out of 114 not no poe and active 24 out of 73 poe plus ports like this is a little bit better information and in the new ui it's just confusing how all that works it's one of those things that I don't really understand or completely get um capacity versus draw so you're looking at your power budgets on here these are things that are not bad some of this stuff is not super clear because they give you like the wi-fi experience for each of the clients and statistics but they're not eh not all that great overall but hey at least you're working on it slowly and surely now we get down to the fixes there's a whole lot of little fixes in here for all kinds of little things like I said I'll leave the list here uh nothing's really they're like typos and they're fix adoption issues with ULT devices these are things I have to even test here at the office so they're nothing I can really say what was wrong with before but hey you may have had some of these problems that's why I'm treating the list now one thing they did I thought was really cool I've always liked the mapping system they had right here but it hasn't gotten love lately at least I thought it didn't until I looked to see and they made some more changes to it and realized that oh that's right they're only giving it some love over here under the new user interface let's go ahead and apply then we're going to go back over to the topology and this is where they updated display options specifically they added the status so you can filter for the status of whether or not these are online offline show your 2.4 gigahertz clients show your 5 gigahertz clients show your wired clients and make the interface unusable again I kind of wish they had better filtering where you could filter for a specific client to show the topology of something but it's all or nothing they still could do a lot better on this but if you're looking not for clients but for the devices um and be able to do this I think this is pretty cool because now we can at least quickly get a topology change see how things are working on there and by clicking on any of these switches I can go to the settings of the switch and actually edit things on there well that broke it well that still needs work because that wasn't supposed to disappear let me reload the page and all right go back and go back to it okay it's working again now so I thought I could edit from there it seems like you should be able to let's see if that breaks it again okay we found a bug I didn't see that last time so I see what it's doing up here it's actually trying to get me right to the port so if we do this that didn't fix it either click on topology all right topology works so it brings up the window so we can edit this but doesn't actually let us change this lets it work on this but don't try and change a port in there apparently you're watching this in real time maybe from someone from unify is watching this too now another weird thing while we're here is if you're over two networks and we only show the one network but we have the ability to add other networks also this particular spot is where you can choose routers even though I don't have a router router is what it gives two devices that support layer three so the lab rekt gen two the studio lab 10g and the unify aggravation switch each one of these do support the layer three routing now this is where things get a little bit confusing because well it's not still not great I've did a video talking about this before I'll even link to a video recently done by kodi from mctelcom networks who also did a video on this and showed a few options you can do and how you actually have to go to the command line to manage any of the settings that you put in here so you can create it here but the management is still done from the command line like for rules and access lists which is weird that they don't have any UI for that but we have to go to advance features when you're in the new UI which going to hit leave then we get to see all my actual vlands I have created and things like that I'm not sure why they split that up in different places because when you go back over to the classic so switch real quick back to here back to this interface deactivate settings networks hey they're all right here and if I want to create a network no problem I can just choose things like hey we're going to go vlan only and I only needed to do vlan now we do this a lot because we're not using any of the unify routing equipment so we'll define the vlands in whichever router we're using pf sense untangle whichever one and then we'll also define them here across the equipment to be able to propagate the vlan and then assign it to the ports as needed through the UI here I'm not sure why they make it kind of difficult when you're going back and forth between the new one but hey that's how they chose to do it now like I said there's a lot of little bug fixes in there and I'm not going to walk through every single one of them I just wanted to show some of the highlights show that yes the update worked which is obviously the first and most important part that I said in the beginning of the video because we had a lot of issues prior where you would do the update and things would just break when they made some changes to the way they do like ap groups and things like that they were major changes in some of those previous versions which is what led to those problems no such major changes were made so so far we haven't noticed anything different things were kind of for the most part left in the same place as they were with the 6.2 series and the 6.4 series now so you're not in a mode where you have to learn a bunch of changes in the UI I also recommend staying up to date because you don't want to be too many versions behind because there are gaps you can't go from too old of a controller all the way to 6.4 unify has that broken down in notes they have like what versions you can skip to and we have had to help people with this and it's a tedious process of loading the same controller that they have and then taking that backup file they might have and then putting it through each version until you get all the way up to the latest version so they can run it because you can't take a backup file from a really old version and immediately put it into the newest version sometimes there's at least sub versions are between depending on the age you don't want to be caught up in any of that so I do recommend staying up on the latest version of this I'll leave links everything down below in the forum post that I mentioned and of course you know follow hostify because they do tweet out when they start migrating more of their service over and how many they've tweeted over that will be some updates that come if you're so nervous you don't just you know you don't want to just Tom saying that it's okay to upgrade plus I may not have the same use case as you so as always before you do these updates make sure you have a backup and a plan to restore back to the previous version if you find a scenario that doesn't work for you or an edge case that causes the migration to fail when you do the update but overall I haven't had any problems running it seems to work quite smooth so want to share the information and links are all down below to everything else thanks and thank you for making it to the end of this video if you enjoyed this content please give it a thumbs up if you like to see more content from this channel hit the subscribe button and the bell icon to hire a sure project head over to laurancesystems.com and click on 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 descriptions of all of our videos including a link to our shirt store where we have a wide variety of shirts and new designs come out well randomly so check back frequently and finally our forums forums.laurancesystems.com is 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