 It is March of 2024 and the Unify controller 8.1.113 has been released. Now this is actually a really nice update. We get Mongo 7 support. We have a lot of UI enhancement, new firewall roll updates, also firewall UI enhancements. So that's actually something I'm really looking forward to is making that a little bit simpler. We'll show you how that works. We get some updated ACL rules for layer three, OSPF and more. So let's get started. Are you an individual or forward-thinking company looking for expert assistance with network engineering, storage, or virtualization projects? Perhaps you're an internal IT team seeking help to proactively manage, monitor, or secure your systems. We offer comprehensive consulting services tailored to meet your specific project needs. Whether you require fully managed or co-managed IT services, our experienced team is ready to step in and help. 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Matter of fact, it actually solved a weird pausing problem I had whenever I was starting up or shutting down my other controller. It came with the last update, but I don't reboot my controller often. So waiting a few extra seconds for it to pause wasn't a big deal, but that is fixed if you were running into that issue. And I only seen it on the self-hosted controllers. I didn't see this on the actual systems itself that were running it, such as the dream machine or other devices. But in this overview, we have the network viewer. We have a lot of other things that, like I said, I'll leave a link to on here. I may do a future video. Let me know in the comments down below on the interspace system, but there's more updates to that. I think it's pretty cool to have that on there. And there's just a ton of little things that they've accomplished here. Let's jump into the actual UI and talk about it. I see the Mongo 7 is in this list, which I think is great. But the UI is where you're going to really see the enhancements on there. And the first one I want to talk about I think has been a long time coming. And that's going to be the topology here. This never made a lot of sense to display it like this. It's just difficult, unless you turn your monitor the other way. So now we have the rotate option. As simple as that is, I'm just thinking this is a better way to view this when you have a lot of devices. Of course, you could still go here and filter. So you have not all the clients and maybe just these devices that are actual devices attached to it, or maybe just the 2.4 clients. But nonetheless, I think this is a much better way to view this, having it on this mode right here where it's rotated. But if you want to, it still defaults to this way. So you can still view it the old way if it's your preference. Next thing I want to talk about here is the settings system. Let me go over to advanced and it's this side panel tabs option. What this allows you to do is when you're looking at the unified devices, we can click on a device, click on another device, click on another device, click on another device and be able to tab through them here. This is simple and it was a little bit easier in the old UI. And then when they came up with a new UI, I didn't really care for the way you can only see one device at a time. So you're trying to compare two devices and look at different settings or what's connected to them. I just think this is a much easier way to do it to put these into little tabs. And of course they got a little X so we can close them all just as simple. Now the next enhancement is this networks tab right here. They have the AI detections. They have clearly jumped on the AI bandwagon because we need AI in here. Really, it's just a detection to see if there's some problems. Like if it notices there's a loop in the network, it will have that information displayed here. I think this is a pretty neat feature. We'll see how good it actually is when I use it a little bit more. But most of the time before setting up the networks, we're not running into a lot of problems. Now this is on my self-hosted controller. We'll go over here to my LTS Lab Unified Dream Machine and you can see what it looks like when you have a full ubiquity setup. So now you have even the VPN server, internet settings, network settings, et cetera in here. Even if you have the site to site VPN policy routing, all of those are in here. I think this is a nice tab so you can get an overview of what's going on with the system matter of fact. I think it's even more useful than the dashboard itself and you could probably default as the new dashboard in my opinion. Now while I'm in the Unified Dream Machine, let's go to settings, let's go to security and look at the traffic rules. They now have the simple versus advanced to display all the rules or just do these simple rules. The other nice thing is we can do mouse over and see IP addresses that are in a rule. This is a big enhancement. I actually didn't update one of my other Unified systems. So I can switch over and show you how the rules looked before. For example, I have to actually click and go into this rule to see any IP addresses on there. This is not ideal in one of the complaints I had before about how their rules look. So this actually makes it better because this is not the best rule layout. And being able to look at it this way is a much enhanced rule layout with a new version. I definitely like this. I think this is going to keep improving as they move along. And those little UI enhancements matter a lot when you have to manage a lot of devices or set things up for clients. Now let's go over here to networks and we want to create a new virtual network and we want to choose my lab all mounted 24. This gives us the option now to go here and we have the isolate network ACL option. So we can turn it on and this will create isolated hosts on this particular network. It actually has some enhanced options that will also allow you to choose which networks, but there's not a lot of other fine grained control. But my understanding from some posts in the forums that that is coming in the future. So once that becomes available, I'll probably do an updated video on it. But it's good to see that they're taking advantage of some of this existing hardware that has these features built in, but does not have the controls via the software to actually enable them. So that will be a future video that'll come out once this feature gets ironed out by the folks over at Unify. Now I'm back on my Unify dream machine. If we go to routing and we go to OSPF, well, we have OSPF here. And I think that's really interesting. This is not a feature that I've seen requested, at least not with most of the clients that we've talked to. When people need these more advanced options, we aren't steering them towards Unify, but I guess that's because Unify never had these features in the past. So I'm happy to see that this type of advanced routing feature is coming to Unify and I'm looking forward to the updates around it. Now I will be taking a more deeper look at the Unify firewalls here in 2024 because, well, these are all the things that I complained about in my previous firewall reviews that are videos that have now been addressed, which makes me really happy. The things that are still missing that I'm hoping to see Unify come out with here in 2024 is going to be high availability. This is something that I was just talking to a client today. They wanted an HA setup and I can't recommend Unify for that, even though that's what they had. And they've also had some experience with some of the back and forth way on failover, which I know has been buggy in the past with some of the Unify firewalls. They just don't give you enough fine grain control over some of those things. But I think these are things that they are able to work through. I like seeing all these enhancement to it. But hey, let me know what you think is your favorite feature that came out of this release of the Unify update. And I've always lived here and from you and your use cases and I love consulting with people who use a lot of Unify because I still love their switches and access points. And I'm really happy to see all the progress they've made around that. I like all the new devices coming out. So yeah, I'm still definitely a fan of the Unify product line despite my misgivings. I have occasionally about business use cases for their firewalls. I still think they're one of the absolute best ones you can have for a consumer firewall for setting things up. I've talked about like the Unify Express. I still think that is one of the really innovative products they've came out with and released that just works well. Auto updates and checks a lot of boxes for people that are looking for just a good firewall for home use. That's a lot better than the garbage provided by your ISP or even some of the generalized things you can find at the big box stores. Like and subscribe, see more content from the channel. Links down below as I mentioned to the full release notes so you can go through all the details on there. If you want to connect to me on this topic or other topics you've seen on my channel forums.laurancesystems.com just a place to do it and thanks.