Folks - I need help.
I bought the UDR7 router during the Black Friday sale just to see what the hype was about and since then I’ve already placed multiple orders for hundreds of dollars of equipment. As we speak I have a cart full of over a thousand dollars more equipment that I’m on the cusp of submitting and and there is no end in sight.
If there is anyone out there who can talk me out of this rabbit hole I fear this may be the last chance for salvation
My name is ccunning and I’m a Unifi-holic…
I used to have a UDM Pro, a Unifi rack mount switch, four APs, three cameras, and two mini POE switches. I sold it all when I moved recently, and now I just have 3 cheapish routers running OpenWRT.
I wish I kept all the Unifi stuff.
Do it.
Dew it.
Edit:
This post is like an addict asking a group of other addicts if they should stop while the whole group takes another hit.B&h photo ans video as well as adorama let you buy ubiquiti equipment and return it.
Ubiquiti has a reputation for not accepting returns on properly functional gear
I too went down this road. Everything bar the Modem is Unifi in my home network now. The central management is very convenient, but if you want to hear about grievances, I got two for you to choose from. First, IPv6 support is needlessly limited. You can have Prefix Delegation or advertise a ULA network, but not both at the same time. No idea why. This seems very easy to implement. Second, the local dynamic DNS (i.e. advertising the IPs of your local clients) works sometimes, but not all the time. You can mitigate this one by using .local as your domain ‘though, in which case you fall back on MDNS in case the Unifi DNS fails.
Go for Mikrotik.
I had to upgrade my EdgeRouterX when I got gig fiber. I kept the Ubiquiti APs, I really like their management interface. But I replaced the router with a Mikrotik RB4011iGS+ because I thought it had a better feature set than the equivalent UBNT and was half the price.
Pretty much any mikrotik is a fantastic piece of kit to have.
It is so unbelievably versatile.
I love the various mikrotik routers, switches and APs I have. I use them all the time for little ad-hoc networks and projects and stuff.
You will learn a lot about networking when using them.But Unifi is a hell of a lot easier to use, and I have not found anything I can’t do on unifi (but I don’t do bgp, mlag, etc at home).
I just got screwed over when my UDR failed after 2.5 years and they refuse to do anything about it because it is just out of warranty. Their tech support admitted it was a hardware failure but they are refusing to replace it.
I’d be really wary about investing in their hardware. I never had something break on me so soon.
Best of luck out there.
The UDR and UDM line are so horrifically poorly designed it’s frankly astonishing they ever left the drawing board. Not only is the shape unwieldy and awkward enough on its own, the thermals on those things are terrible. I used to wake up to no internet every few weeks because my UDM would overheat and would be unable to boot until you cooled it down. I learned to just stick it in the fridge for a bit to cool it down so it could boot again.
The UniFi UCG ultra and the Max are far better machines, capable of doing just as much if not more than the Pill shaped routers while staying cool and not sounding like a jet engine every time you send a text over wifi. The only thing you even lose is the integrated Access Point which sucks compared to the discrete ones anyway.
Get ready to see lots of this in your future:
No explanation, the connection is fine, the cloudkey is fine, the camera is fine, it just randomly decides to drop quality permanently.
Is this a common issue folks have with Protect? I haven’t seen it talked about so far.
TBH, for me, Protect has been so much better than the other NVR solutions I’ve tried it has been a big driving force behind the appeal for me.
I’ve seen a few posts on reddit while trying to solve it, but no idea how widespread the issue is. There certainly isnt a solution that I’ve found yet.
Other than this issue, I agree, protect is quite good, but there isnt much point having nice 4k cameras if they dont work correctly…
Oh, also, had 2 cloudkeys develop disk problems within weeks of owning them, so that was very annoying. 3rd one is going strong though.
How was support experience wrt replacing the bad cloudkeys?
Went through the local PC shop, so not too bad, but still frustrating.
I’ve tried a lot of self-hosted NVR solutions as well as Synology Surveillance Station and Unifi Protect.
Granted I only tried with third party cameras and never Unifi cameras, but I was not a big fan of Protect, even with latest updates. Performance was just so sluggish for live view to come up or even scrubbing the recording. Support for third party cameras is also extremely limited, only supporting ONVIF and ignoring any events camera provides.
Synology has been rock solid, but very $$$ for camera licenses.
Scrypted to get cameras into HKSV is pretty great. Frigate is awesome at “AI” detection and classification, but needs a GPU or TPU accelerator.
Most recently I decided to save myself some headaches and got Aqara G5 Pro cameras. Native HomeKit Secure Video, ability to save video to NAS just as video files for long term storage, free 24HR continuous recording to Aqara cloud, ONVIF and RTSP feeds so the cameras can integrate with Protect or any other NVR.
