Ubiquiti launches UniFi OS Server for self-hosting

> Their security issues in the past.

That's why I moved off as well. Maybe some day SDN (at least so far as the ubiquity experience goes) will become an OpenWRT priority.

The thread you reference ends with the post saying "it is fixed in the 7.4.140 controller release", so im not sure how you can say it wasnt acknowledged or fixed.

I’m curious to know more about your setup! Which switches do you prefer? What hardware are you using for proxmox? And what does your network look like?

Cheers!

> TP-Link is less expensive and better performance. WiFi 7 and 10gbit for less money.

Thanks, they really seem like good alternative.

is there a writeup on the openwrt/proxmox vm for routing you talk about? Examples of the cheap switches?

Their software updates are also very flakey. The past few releases for the Console and occasionally the Network were pulled right after being published for having blocking bugs. Again and again they publish the update and then do QA on their users. If you have an IT department you probably have some sort of process in place to deal with this and deploy when you're satisfied. A home user will probably have auto-updates enabled and bite the bullet again and again.

A while ago one update automatically enabled PMF (set to required, I believe) on all Wi-Fi networks. That didn't go great for me when half of my IoT devices stopped connecting and I wasn't available to fix.

Thank you so much for this great news!

This looks cool but it's not on any camera brand I have ever heard of before. I have a bunch of hikvision stuff that is on its own vlan with no internet access because it's concerningly chatty with Chinese IPs. I would love to put openipc on them.

The new generation Ubiquiti hardware with built-in management is really good, inexpensive, and interface is responsive. It's also just good looking. They've really gotten better across the board. I'm using the Cloud Gateway Max.

https://ui.com/us/en/cloud-gateways/compact

My EdgeRouter X just mysteriously died once when I had to reboot it. No idea what happened to it but it just never was accessible through any means.

Hopefully the Unifi devices are better since I eventually replaced it with Cloud Gateway Ultra after dabbling with a second-hand MikroTik.

RouterOS does feel a little clunky for sure, but you can configure _everything_. And once it's set up, it works beautifully and consistently.

Ubiquiti's routers to me just seem to be prosumer routers with an "enterprise" UI on top. Whereas Mikrotik genuinely offer an enterprise experience (also still great for home) with the boring, drab, absurdly functional UI to back it up.

Ubiquiti looks beautiful; but you can't do anything with it.

I have a bit of a soft spot for Mikrotik, but I can't help feel like their hardware only exists to sell training.

For our house I tried a Mikrotik, a TP Link and a Ubiquiti AP. The only one that really works in our case is the Ubiquiti. Also for a home that's mostly Apple hardware, you kinda need a manage wifi solution, because Apples WIFI stack have issues switching between APs and needs a controller to kick you off (I don't know if that's still the case). Ubiquiti have one of the only routers that will force Apple hardware to switch APs. Mikrotiks CAPsMAN isn't even really a WIFI/AP controller, it's just provisioning.

For all it's flaws, I still really want to just run 100% Mikrotik gear.

The GL.iNet Flint 2 came highly recommended (near cult following) from my own pretty extensive research for offboarding ubiquity. It comes with a OpenWRT fork pre-installed, but flashing mainline OpenWRT is officially supported. I've been happy so far.

The Flint 3 just launched, and the headline feature is WiFi 7: that should be less of an issue if you're going with separate APs.

Agreed, Mikrotik's configuration is sufficiently different from just about anything else that it takes some significant getting used to.

Admittedly it's still not as awkward/bad as Draytek.

Honestly my router for the last 10 years is an openbsd box + pf rules for routing, dhcpd and dnscrypt_proxy...

I have an ansible playbook that creates the image and I run it on a cheap fanless x86 box....

Personally, I've had good luck with Reolink cameras. I block them from the Internet at the router, just in case, but they do seem to respect your choice if you disable the cloud/mobile app feature.

The cameras will upload jpegs and mpegs to a local FTP server based on configurable triggers, which include 'AI' detection of animal/vehicle/human, all running on-camera.

I wrote a simple script to put all the daily uploaded jpegs on a HTML webpage (each linked to the video) for review. Home Assistant also has an integration that can do streaming and grabs the detection triggers as well.

Most people I know in a similar situation went with generic ip cameras paired with a synology nas for an inexpensive option.

I've always said that Unifi handles well enough the 10% of networking configuration that 90% of users need. If you're in that other 10% of admins who need something more complex then it's not the right pick, but in a great many cases it's strongly planted in "good enough" territory.

Like the other commenter said, VLANs are table stakes.

Try making a multi-homed IPv6 network with Ubiquiti gear. Easy (I might even say trivial) to do with an OpenBSD router and PF, but impossible with Ubiquiti because of how they broke the DHCPv6 client so that it can't accept leases from multiple interfaces and assign them to `radvd` for SLAAC.

You want to do anything other than the most basic task of advertising a single prefix from your ISP? Like advertise the same ULA on multiple VLANs for local services? Well, fuck you for wanting to do that. (Even EdgeOS could do that.)

All of your modern (anything from the last 10 years) phones, computers and tablets already know how to handle multiple IPv6 SLAAC addresses from different subnets and route packets appropriately. All you need is a not-braindamaged router.

The firewall in Unifi is a huge regression compared to EdgeOS, and completely brain damaged compared to PF.

Oh, and the MDNS reflector... why is it so bad?

Ok, I think I need to stop now.

Vlans are table stakes.

Unifi still doesn't have great IPv6 support in 2025 and that's insane for anything that's trying to position itself even remotely near professional grade gear.

It appears to have changed recently but at least around the beginning of covid, you still had to SSH into their gateway/router thing and manually edit a JSON file to configure even basic S/DNAT rules. When the whole selling point of the gear is SPOG MGMT web ui, it's fair to consider "SSH in and edit files" as fighting your gear.

The number of times that I have had accurate, timely, correct, competent support experiences is zero.

The number of times I've been gaslit, lied to, misled or otherwise asked to repeat the same basic diagnostics and troubleshooting that I had already done in the opening ticket message... Is high. Something I would expect from D-Link or any other cheap gear. Not at all acceptable at ubiquity prices.

Speaking of garbage quality support, dead links!

case in point: https://help.ubnt.com/hc/en-us/articles/215458888-UniFi-How-...

That used to be my reference or how to access the config file I needed to edit for basic Nat. Now who knows where that information is. Maybe the way back machine?

I haven't looked inside any of the latest gen 7 access points but I remember not being impressed with there overpriced gen 6 access point using last generation chip from Qualcomm... Which is unacceptable at their prices.

I stand by my point: if you buy their older switching gear, you can get a really good deal. Don't use them for routing unless your needs are relatively straightforward

> There's no better prosumer option - good, bad or otherwise

Mikrotik maybe?

I run both ubiquiti and mikrotik stuff. The mikrotik definitely has... a learning curve, but you can do some stuff with it that's pretty difficult with ubiquiti.

  Maybe if one doesn't actually understand networking nomenclature or interop, sure.

They're cheap and nasty, but they mostly worked.

I have a couple sites with both types of cameras. And I really love all the customizability with my Frigate / Reolink site. But UniFi can command the premium on the camera hardware because of all the features they give you on the software side of their NVR. It's far better than what you get out of the box compared to something like Reolink in terms of detection and set-it-and-forget-it mentality.

I have a site that has 8 cameras and 2 of the 8 are original cameras that are >5 years old still getting firmware updates. Reolink does not do this and I have had much higher failure rate with them as well. Especially in outdoor cameras that have to handle snow/ice/extreme cold.

Yep, now that TP-Link have fixed the weird Deco bug where you couldn't forward more than one (non contiguous) port to the same internal machine I'm very happy with them, the wifi coverage is ridiculously good.

UXG definitely does DHCP and DNS.

My criticism was mainly of the original article for failing to link to a primary source beyond hotlinking some dmgs.

I appreciate you linking these, though, as well as the extra context.

I stopped buying Ubiquiti when I reset my UDM Pro and took it to another house without internet access, and it refused to "activate" without an Internet Connection or a phone app connection. Seems they are more interested in selling a lifestyle rather than actual production network equipment.

Having seen a few slippery slope situations like this over the years with IoT and other services, I'm simply not willing to make any concessions in that direction. I use a UDM Pro and turning on cloud access requires associating that hardware with a Unify cloud account. That's already undesirable if you want to safeguard privacy.

Will it still get automatic updates in case of security issues?

A UPS is not a solution for all power outages, just ones short enough to last the UPS uptime. The brains of the system is supposed to be the Cloud Key anyway which has its own built in “UPS” and seems to shut down gracefully if you kill power.

The cameras and viewports should not be writing data at all after an initial configuration if designed properly and killing power should present no problems to any system with a read-only filesystem. As someone who designs systems like these it absolutely baffles me.

Version 1 Cloud Keys would brick upon power loss.

Ummm..... So the solution to cameras taking several hours to take back to life is to.... just to make sure the will never go offline?

The UPS remark is such an non sequitur. Sure, it's prudent to have one but this doesn't make the bug go away.

I agree, not sure why you are being downvoted.

Constantly tweaking settings is not a use-case they have optimized for. Most of their customers are small IT shops that support small/medium sized businesses. They set up a network for a few doctors offices, law firms, etc. by clicking a few buttons in the controller's GUI once, and then remotely keep an eye on the networks with the controller software's remote management features.

Eh, in my experience, if you disable the uplink monitor features aggressively enough (which is in a different place in different firmwares and currently seems to also require disabling all wireless uplink/“mesh” capability), then sometime more of the network will stay up. Maybe even the gateway will keep working too if you don’t touch any gateway settings. Of course, if the gateway does decide to reboot, you’re down for many minutes.

It’s real classy.

If you can spring for Ruckus (I just buy used off ebay), it's worth it. The controller is integrated into the AP - for me that was worth it over unifi alone.

> An off the self Asus all in one home router actually has more features and capabilities.

This is just not true at all. I agree unifi can be buggy at times, and their super clean interface means they need to hide stuff all over the place, but I havent found any network configuration I couldnt do on Unifi yet.

Care to elaborate on exactly which functions standard asus routers have over Ubiquiti gear?

This. I don't use their gateways/ security devices anymore. I run ONSense at every edge which allows me to so some really nice things with respect to remote access for non-home sites.

But unifi is trying to position at the prosumer segment.

And we have things like indeed no WiFi (all networks down) if you dare to change WiFi settings, or mdns having a hard limit of five networks because the underlying Perl script is 10 or 15 years old.

Funny, I did the same... Never looked back at Unifi. That was a constant fight with problems.

OPNsense, a cheap fanless Brocade switch, and two Ruckus enterprise-grade APs from eBay and boom. Stuff Just Works, and when I want to do anything fancy (I did a /lot/ of weird network setup to troubleshoot users' WFH scenarios during COVID times) I just could.

Yeah, that was exactly it. Unifi have a special page in their docs for dealing with Sonos.

https://help.ui.com/hc/en-us/articles/18930473041047-Best-Pr...

I ended up connecting everything with a wired connection and disabling WiFi. Thankfully I have cat6 to every room so it wasn't an inconvenience.

It's worked perfectly since.

How could a Sonos device possibly interact with spanning tree? Are there Sonos devices that act as bridges?

Google it.

But yes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Pera#Apple

The "UniFi Protect" NVR server can ingest a feed from a 3rd party ONVIF camera, but I don't believe Ubiquiti's own cameras can expose themselves over ONVIF. Their camera's still seemed locked to their NVR software. (Though they do have a very basic managment interface hosted on themselves, and you can ssh into them)

> They support ONVIF now in their backend.

Got a link? I'm curious about which profile(s) and does this mean that it's still proprietary between the NVR and camera but from the NVR I can get an onvif profile compatible feed?

I had the same problems with the Gen 1. The Gen 2 added a battery and shutdown on powerless, and never had a single problem with it.

This is the first time UniFi OS can be self hosted, before you were able to use UniFi Network Application (Server), however this never included features like Teleport, Identity, Cybersecure subscription and many other features that require UniFi OS.

Yeah when I got 10 Gbit internet at home, all the options for a router looked really expensive so I bought a Lenovo ThinkCentre Tiny for $80 + $20 for the riser+NIC, and installed OpenWRT on it. Runs like a charm, power draw is a the same as the ISP's monthly rental router.

> … pushes out buggy software as production-ready and that we're all their beta testers is a pretty common …

this is such a pet peeve of mine lately. companies are doing this all over the map now, from cars (especially self-driving), games, network equipment, entire software suites… and on and on.

i absolutely did not opt in to be a beta tester as a random human on public ways. i did not opt in to be a beta tester for your search engine results. i did not opt in to be a beta tester for the games i spend $90+ on. i did not opt in to beta test your company’s network equipment which we paid full price for.

build and closed test your products with interested parties who explicitly opt-in and quit forcing and charging us to be experiments in your company’s r&d.

I hear this talked about in the past but is it still true today?

I've at least never experienced it (and I stick to the Stable/Release channel).

I have 4 AP, 9 cameras, NVR and Dream Machine - I guess I got lucky over the 2.5 years I've had Unifi.

You can easily turn off automatic updates. I check the forum before I update. Haven’t had any issues for 10+ years.

I haven't found that to be the case on Stable channel.

(I do notice people on forums love to use Early Access update channel where... YMMV).

> Elgato Key Light Air (or whatever its called) to work on my Unifi network

I also have struggled with this, and spent many hours bashing my head against a specific setting in PFSense that requires a plugin to enable.

Then, I thought to try updating the firmware on my Unifi WiFi AP, and have had (almost) no problems ever since. It has taught me to think twice about spending $100+ on a piece of niche electronics that can only be controlled if it is compatible with your WiFi...

It’s there - just built into the binary. ;)

but yeah that was upsetting - I was hoping they’d push them to a registry and make them… more available.