Wednesday, 21 August 2024

Unifi Networking - Longer term thoughts.

For the past several years I've been running Ubiquiti's network gear for the router/firewall and wireless access points that provide connectivity in my home. And after several years of working with it here it's getting to be time to look into moving to something new and I'm of a mixed mind of sticking with Unifi for the entire stack.


The wireless access points work great, and I really have no complaints about them. They provide great coverage, reliable uptime, and haven't given me any real issue over time. 

Routing however, that's more of a mixed bag.
 
The main reason that I don't just run whatever the ISP provides for a router is because they don't have the flexibility that I want to play around with. If all I was doing was using the web to watch content and check email then it would be more than fine, but as soon as I need to start messing with the DNS servers and other things it suddenly starts to become limiting. 

Previously I was runing PfSense for my routing and firewall, but when that hardware gave up the ghost I picked up a USG3, and it's great about showing statistics in the Unifi Application and giving me a single point to manage everything from there are a few things that it doesn't have in the UI where you have to fall back to command line on the router to make the changes that you need. 

Thankfully most of the things that require manually poking at the router are things that don't change frequently, but it's still frustrating enough that I'm questioning sticking with Unifi routing as a platform when I need to replace the device that's currently sitting in my wiring closet. 

Going with a SFF or Micro PC running something open source wouldn't cost really any more than getting the latest version of the Unifi kit. 

The other option that i'm considering is looking into some of Mikrotik's equipment. We wound up picking up some of thier stuff for a project at work and so far no complaints. And given the pricing that I'm seeing on their stuff it seems like it's better priced in a lot of ways compared to the stuff that Ubiquiti is putting out. 

On the downside I would have to learn a new ecosystem, but on the upside I can get a fancy red router. 





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