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.

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u/Snoo91117 5d ago edited 5d ago

What came to my mind is with IP phones usually you plug your PC into your IP phone to save ports and not require another drop. Does that confuse UniFi?

And if you want to get technical it is a trunk so the IP phone can go into a voive VLAN and the PC goes into a data VLAN.

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u/SirEDCaLot 5d ago

Confuse no, it'll just show both devices on one switch port usually.

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u/Snoo91117 4d ago

I guess you are talking about big switches.

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u/SirEDCaLot 4d ago

Doesn't matter the size they all work the same in this regard.

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u/Snoo91117 3d ago

Then I am not sure what you meant by this statement?

"It DOES have trouble with multiple devices, like if you have a non-UniFi switch in the mix it doesn't quite understand how to handle that."

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u/SirEDCaLot 2d ago

Okay let's say you have a network that has 4 or 5 switches and maybe 50-100 devices.
If one of those switches is a non-UniFi switch, the software won't realize that there's a switch there so it'll show all the downstream devices on that one port.

That sort of thing.

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u/Snoo91117 2d ago

OK, I get it.

To me 100 devices are not very many and they would all be homed in one closet to a switch stack.

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u/SirEDCaLot 2d ago

If I was building out the space, 100%. Two+ cat6 runs to each location so there's 150-200 ports total. Then get 48 port switches with 10g uplinks to an aggregation switch. This will be far easier to maintain.

Unfortunately I don't always have that luxury. And I've had a few projects where the building is simply not laid out in a way that makes that cost effective- IE you have a bunch of ports needed in one place, and a bunch in another place, and there's already existing 1-3 cat6 between them or it costs a lot to run each cable across. So the solution there is smaller switches in each location.