I’m about $1000 into a complete network rebuild. Initially my network was based on a different Ubiquiti product called Edgemax. Recent blogs and vlogs suggest that the Edgemax brand is meant for ISP and the Unifi was meant for the Enterprise. My needs are somewhere in the middle and after all this I think I want to return the Unifi devices.
I think the talking heads believe that an enterprise environment is similar to your home. Mostly flat, maybe a partition for IoT versus home computers. And the ISP side looks like man hundreds or thousands of machines on any type of network. For the most part, under the covers these systems are very similar. The main difference is the GUI. The Edgemax is very admin intensive. You have a lot of work to do. The Unifi does a lot of work for you but is incomplete and filled with bugs. (I worked for a company that did this sort of work and I know it’s hard)
While some of the problems here are compounded because the vlogs I’ve watched are implementations of very simple networks it does not take long to fall flat. I tried to configure this network on my workbench. That worked for a while but since I did not have examples of my entire network it was just a guess…
so here are some gotchas
When I connected my UDM to my ISPs modem (ATT) and configured my port forwarding… it did not work. There were a number of problems here. [1] the ISP modem needed to have it’s passthru reassigned. Even though I was getting 100% traffic out the modem did not know what the route in was. [2] Even though you can specify multiple ports in the port forward rule. Only one port or a range works.
I configured 2 pi-hole DNS sinkholes. They did not say but there is no way to sync the two piholes. Also since the UDM is doing all of the DHCP DNS, and I have multiple internal domain names… it took a bit to set the DNS uplink path so that it worked properly. And even though I thought I got it right… it’s still wrong. DNS requests go from the PC’s resolver to pihole to the UDM and then to cloudflare. It’s the stop between the pihole and the UDM that does not make any sense…. because if I DIG the hostname I’m looking for using the UDM I get the proper answer… and then a miracle happens… pihole remembers upstream results and at some point the cache was wrong.
my LAB network consists of – 2x NAS, 2x ESXi Servers with 7 guests each, 1 Docker server, 1 desktop and 1 Chromebox – and there was a bunch of NFS mounts, static network configurations, non auto-restarting services and so on. After the first boot simple replugging in the ethernet cable did not force sufficient DHCP IPs to be assigned. I had to power cycle every machine. Even then I needed to manually check each machine… Once they accepted the new VLAN the many IPs were still stale. Part of that was pihole but mostly UDM. The UDM map just never showed the correct relationship. In order to get one machine configured properly I needed to set the fixed IP then disconnect. The defaults simply did not make sense.
one crazy bit is the MAP. I have about 40 different WIFI devices and the map is unreadable. Also using the Amplifi instead of the UBM means that I do not get usable telemetry on the dashboard.
as I’m writing this… one of my DNS servers disappeared from the GUI
I have some devices set as “Fixed IP” that are not and some that are not show up in various filters.
I should have learned my lesson that all of this integration just does not work.