Installed a fancy Ubiquiti Unifi Dream Machine Special Edition (it’s a network router) into my home network on Friday. I like it. I’ve liked the Unifi line of products for a long time. Ran some of their earlier h/w (switches, gateway, etc) along with a gateway controller inside of a Docker container to manage a few Unifi PoE APs. The h/w & s/w has been quite robust through the years. That kind of “set it & forget it” reliability I want in my infrastructure and tools.
I held off from acquiring the UDM (Unifi Dream Machine) because I didn’t like the requirement of a cloud account, either to use it in an ongoing basis (since removed) or to perform initial configuration (since removed) or to perform initial setup with a dedicated mobile app (since removed) or to require an internet connection for setup (since removed). Plug the UDM into power, plug my laptop into the UDM via a network cable, open a browser and… go!
Manually copy over some configuration about IPs, DNS and firewall port forwarding rules from an ASUS router to the UDM and it just worked so smooth. Nice and easy.
I am happy to opt-in to voluntary share statistics and analytics of how I use the h/w & s/w with Ubiquiti, but I don’t want to be coerced into “cloud” anything or mobile app requirements to use a tool.