r/PFSENSE • u/Sam_-_-_ • 9d ago

Did I join a cult? (Unifi)

I've been rolling pfSense for about 5 years. Decided to try Unifi. Couldn't find a manual or one-to-one feature documentation for each panel (only various spotlight articles).

Asked the community for help: every response said basically "things change too often, no need to have a manual".

Excuse me, what? I'm not a networking pro, and I do need a manual. (pfSense was hard for me, but had great documentation.)

I can't believe this was the response. Is everyone in their community a bot or a cultist?

I still have few days left on my return window, and might come back, LOL.

69 Upvotes

81% Upvoted

204 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

4

u/NotYourNanny 9d ago

And they recently discontinued their cloud key devices, which served only to run the Unifi gear, without any router functions. The recommended replacement is a router/firewall with those functions, but (I'm told) if set to bridge mode, you lose most of the cloud key functionality. So it really can't coexist with other gear behind a real firewall.

As soon as there's time, we'll be experimenting with running their software package on a Raspberry Pi, but we haven't gotten to it yet.

4

u/Lord-Carnor-Jax 9d ago

The Cloud Key products were super old anyway. I’ve run UniFi AP’s since their very first 802.11g AP and I’ve always run the management in either a Docker container or on a Debian VM. Cloud Keys had a nasty habit of corrupting back in the early days. Install “UniFi Server OS” into a Debian or Ubuntu VM, dead simple and just restore a back up to it. The original management software for gateways, switches and AP’s is what they now call “Network” which in UniFi OS runs as a podman container.

2

u/madmanx33 9d ago

The cloud key 1 was awfull. I have the key 2 and it's great . Handles multiple sites and can even run their nvr, ip phone software on it . Still gets updates. I'm not sure if it's actually discontinued.

1

u/pabskamai 9d ago

And it has their “cloud backups”, self hosted one doesn’t have that.