Between buying a second home and taking over the ADU at our primary residence to be my home office, the need to make 20-some new lights smart had me reconsidering our home automation strategy. Our main home has somewhere in the neighborhood of 80 Zigbee bulbs and I’m just sooooo over them. People can’t be trained not to flip switches, no amount of remotes on the walls and blocks on the switches will stop them. Plus my non-Hue bulbs never get firmware updates, so they’re older than manufacturers figuring out that maybe they shouldn’t all turn on after a power outage.
Also thanks to tariffs / COVID / inflation, the bulbs I used to routinely buy for $6-7 are now more like $10.
Somethings I find I’ve unintentionally made something magic happen. This weekend I brought an unprovisioned UniFi Talk phone to our cabin in the mountains, expecting to need to perform some VPN trickery with a VPS to get a local Talk install properly receiving calls behind CGNAT. Imagine my surprise when I plugged it in and my existing Talk install back home discovered the new phone.
It adopted just fine, no problems making and receiving calls through the VPN tunnel.
The “magic” was that I run multicast-relay on all my personal networks and have it configured to also relay to my VPN network. All the wannabe Network Engineers’ heads are exploding at the thought, but I’m sure I had reasons when I decided to do that and, well, My Networks, My Choice.
Then I fired up my new Home Assistant install and quickly realized that auto-discovery across a VPN tunnel is not always a good thing 🤣 When I have more round tuits I will perhaps make things a bit more granular.
Well, guess I lost a bet on that one. At 21 months since announcement, that has been one incredibly long EA cycle. Still $499 — because why shouldn’t you pay a premium to get lower-spec hardware that runs less software?
Speaking of long EA cycles, I’m still very happy with my UISP Console / UISP-R Pro. Still plenty of functionality to wish for but as a basic router they’ve been rock solid.
Ubiquiti first teased the UNMS Router Pro back in August of 2020, with the first Early Access sales in October. This is an exciting device, basically the UDM Pro hardware platform shrunk down to a desktop form-factor, minus the drive bay, priced at $299. I bought one and played with it for a minute but at that time it was hamstrung by UNMS/UISP just not providing enough control over routing functionality to be useful in any way.
Last month they released a revised version called the UISP Console. An internal 128GB SSD was added to support running UISP directly and the price dropped to $199.
I imagine the price drop is to incentivize more people to test a router that has been known to be in development for over a year and the price will go up at release. But right now, $199 for a 10Gb router is an incredible deal. And a year of development has brought UISP routing to the point where it’s serviceable.
At the core software level, the UISP routers run UbiOS and really are “the same” as the UDM line, minus everything that happens in the unifi-os container. It’s running the ubios-udapi-server and udapi-bridge and the /config/ubios-udapi-server/ubios-udapi-server.state looks just like what you’d see on a UDM. It’s the same on the (presumably discontinued) Router Pro and the UNMS/UISP Router Lite UISP Router (based on the same MediaTek platform of the ER-X and its many variants).
All of them are initially configured via Bluetooth on a smartphone running the UISP app. With the UISP Console, it will join to your existing UISP installation if you are currently signed in. Otherwise, it will go through the process of setting up the onboard UISP instance with cloud-based proxying via an *.r.uisp.com domain.
The “router functionality” is still pretty minimal. You can assign IPs to interfaces, add static routes, configure OSPF, and set Source and Destination NAT rules both pre- and post- routing. Aside from routing, it has Firewalling on par with what an EdgeRouter can do and a DHCP server.
And that’s it.
Still no DNS, PPPoE, DHCP Relay, VPN, Load Balancing / Failover, BGP, VRRP, and a host of other functionality that is common and expected to be found on a router. The latest theorizing is that these products are targeted to ISPs with low technical expertise, so I maybe wouldn’t hold my breath on some of those more advanced features ever arriving, but even with that narrowed scope there are many glaring omissions.
That said, I’ve deployed my UISP Console to proper Home Production use. I recently had fiber Internet installed at my home with an add-on static IP allocation, and the UISP routing platform is perfectly sufficient for dividing that up. Ironically, UniFi 6.5.51 just went GA and finally has the functionality to make multiple WAN IPs useful for most common scenarios, but I have some services I’d like to expose to the Internet directly without any NAT and that’s much simpler to do if I route those IPs directly to a non-UniFi router.
The UniFi fanbois were aflutter when Ubiquiti released this video promoting an upcoming UniFi Dream Router:
It sounded like a substantial upgrade to the UniFi Dream Machine: WiFi 6, two ports of PoE, 128GB SSD, an SD slot for storage expansion, and the ability to run Protect and other Ubiquiti controllers that haven’t been available to UDM users due to the lack of storage.
A Raspberry Pi is great if you have a need for which it excels. GPIO, extremely low power requirements, tight space constraints. But the Pi should not be the first thing you reach for when “Unobtrusive and Inexpensive Linux Host” are the only requirements.
Early last month, my 20-month old UNVR stopped working. I pulled the drives, tried the Reset button, and thanked the Deities that I live in an area where a UNVR is something that I can buy. In a store. On a Sunday.
At the time I’d seen hints that wearing out the internal storage was not uncommon. What I hadn’t learned, yet, was that the internal storage is a USB stick. My discovery of this was accidental — I was mucking around on my new UNVR and decided to run lsbusb -tv and there it was.
With a quick search of the Googles I found fresh knowledge that it is, in fact, a generic USB stick, and that replacing it is as simple as putting in a blank drive and holding the Reset button on boot. I guess they learned some lessons from the EdgeRouter Lite USB failure debacle. Just. Not the lesson that they should never put a USB stick in a device!
Old and Busted. Blast it with a heat gun or your girlfriend’s blow dryer for a moment to release the glue.New Hotness, Samsung Fit 32GB.
I’m tempted to hack this “extra” UNVR into a NAS, though I have concerns about what could go wrong if the USB fails again. I’ve had great luck with Samsung Fit drives but maybe an M.2 SATA SSD in a USB adapter would be a better option.
