 Tom here from Warren Systems, and this video is a little bit different. I need to do this video about the Cisco Business Dashboard because I'm reviewing some other Cisco products that support the Cisco Business Dashboard. But the big but here, I like doing videos that are tutorials that teach you things like how to set this up or how to get this going. And yes, I'm aware I do a lot of unified videos, but I've also done a video on the Aruba Instant On gear. I've also talked about the ingenious gear, and some of those have their cloud controllers that they tie to. But the question comes up all the time, what about a self-hosted controller? And Unify pretty much dominates the market in this next one down. What about TP-Link Omata? I've done a review of those. I think the Omata is well, they just copied Unify and made it cheaper. But I don't feel like they've up security. Matter of fact, I don't really trust their whole security, but I'm not going to get too deep into that as a topic. I just don't know how good of a product it is for any large scale deployments. Also, I don't know anyone who's done Omata at large scale. Now, I spent some time on this a few months ago, because I did a video with David Bumble, and he connected me with some Cisco people who sent me the Cisco switch and Cisco access points that support the dashboard. And this dashboard is self-hosted from Cisco. You get free 25 licenses to put 25 devices inside the self-hosted dashboard that can manage them in a similar way to the way Unify dashboard works. So I wanted to really give this product a look because this is something that I think would be interesting to my audience and interesting from a, hey, can we look at a Unify alternative? And Cisco's a pretty big name in networking. They have the resources to build a solid, well-built product. But I don't really feel that's what they did here. And that's where this video goes into a little bit of a rant. I spent some time on it. And then I set it down because I couldn't get it working. I thought it was just me not understanding Cisco. Then I really took the time to reach out to a lot of friends who also tried and couldn't get it working. And they were Cisco people, not Unify people. Matter of fact, they were trying to go from Meraki to looking at this and found the Meraki platform better, was their opinion. One person had messaged me that they hired a Cisco consultant and spent like a month working on this. And Cisco never, they got it further than I did, but didn't get it working to where they thought it was a good product either. So then I did a post on Reddit and no one really had any good comments on the Reddit post. I'll leave that link down below. I just did that the other day. I just wanted to try to do what I feel is some level of due diligence before I say this thing isn't that great. The first thing is the documentation is not wonderful. It says use version Ubuntu 16. And that's obviously an unsupported end of life version. So I tried it with 22 and that didn't work. So I went back to version 20. It does work with 20 Ubuntu. So that hopefully will save you a little bit of trouble if you're trying to get this dashboard deployed. I will also let you know that the minimum requirements of four gigs of RAM is not really a minimum requirements. I would really recommend six or eight gigs to get this running because four gigs of RAM causes it to chug and take forever to start. Speaking of taking forever to start, one of the other quirks is it takes seven minutes from the time the system boots, then the system goes idle for seven minutes and then it starts. I don't know why, but that creates confusion where you think the dashboard doesn't start because it gets stuck in a loop saying Cisco dashboard initializing. It sits there for seven minutes before whatever it's doing for those seven minutes at almost no processes running a very low load on the CPU before it starts. And I've tried this on some rather fast AMD new server equipment, even in the cloud, and still didn't work. The forum posts that got me the furthest were the ones that basically said, Hey, it's putting the dashboard settings doesn't work. And Cisco engineer said, try this, try this. Then someone had posted, Hey, you got to turn on SNMP, which is disabled by default on the switches, which then at least makes it reach out to the dashboard. I don't know why SNMP being on is what causes it to reach out to the dashboard. But Hey, I did learn that going through there, but didn't find that in the Cisco documentation. So I went through a lot of these processes. I found nothing in the Cisco dashboard event log that ever led me to a clue as to why things weren't working. I could have absolutely reached out to Cisco because they sent me this stuff. And they probably would have loved to talk to me and, you know, walk me through as someone who's got an audience that talks about networking gear and held my hand and done a whole setup demo for me. But I don't think that gives you the people watching this the best experience because I wanted to experience more as you would experience it. Once it liked to set this up, spin it up in a cloud instance, it does have let's encrypt that which they have that embedded within there. So try it that way too. And didn't get me any further. Well, that means far as I am here is making this video. So I want you to leave your thoughts and comments down below on this. I'm going to leave this video as a reference when I do the reviews of the switches and access points when people ask about the dashboard or when I reference that. Yes, it says it supports the Cisco business dashboard for, you know, managing these things. But here's my video on that particular topic. So I'm going to stop ranting right here just so I don't make this video really long. If you have a better experience than I've been able to find with the Cisco dashboard, leave your comments down below on that. If you have a link to some easy tutorial on getting this set up that I was just unable to find by going through and reading the Cisco documentation, DM me on the socials, hit me up in my forums, those are great places to engage me on that. So I'm curious if any of my audiences had a better experience with this. Any of my friends who are also using Cisco products, so they are more pro Cisco than me didn't share that experience with me. Even as I said, they didn't have a great experience setting up and testing it, but nonetheless, I will take this video down. I will remove it if I was just an idiot and completely misunderstood something, or I'm just missing a really obvious thing. But I've configured so many different networking devices over the years, and it's a lot more than the ones I've reviewed on my channel, because sometimes we get contracted to do jobs. So I've worked with even like extreme networks and Arrow Hive and all those other words, I know Arrow Hive became extreme, but those seem more intuitive to use than this. So this stuff really kind of drove me nuts. Like I didn't have to spend time on engineers with any of these, even the Aruba stuff that I reviewed, or even the little modest stuff. I just followed the documentation and it worked, even in Genius. Their documentation, I commented, wasn't that great, but I got it all working. I can muddle my way through some networking. I've been doing this for a long time. So why the Cisco one? I feel defeated. I couldn't tell if it was just me. I don't want to seem biased, but those are my thoughts. Let me know yours. Thanks.