The New Best UniFi Home Router!? Review and Installation

[Music] what's up guys Jackie with MTS and this is the UniFi Express a product with so much potential but that's been handicapped in so many ways that it drew me out of hiding let's talk about it now the UniFi Express is ubiquity latest entry into their Cloud managed consoles Gateway all-in-one devices and goes up alongside the dream machine dream machine SE dream wall and dream router and the OG dream machine cylinder thing for those of you that still have that and remember it exists but this guy does not take on that dream name and we'll talk a little bit about that later being an all-in-one device the UniFi Express runs its own UniFi network controller as well as it features a built-in router capable of 1 gig no more USG sub one gig and we'll talk about that again with a major asteris later it features a builtin UniFi access point and a first for any ubiquity Cloud manage device this guy is the first device that runs its own controller that can also be adopted to another controller and we'll talk again about the sadly asterisk that goes along with that but while this guy can function as its own full complete system pull it out of the box pull out your phone it'll Bluetooth find this guy you can set it up in no time making it a really awesome tool to keep in your Tech bag if you're trying to do on-site troubleshooting this guy can also be adopted to another system whether it be a dream machine dream router another UniFi Express or even selfhosted UniFi Network applications including ones from providers like hostify this guy can be adopted to all of those controllers with a caveat again now the big caveat being you have full ability to run this guy with its built-in controller and get the router get the access point all that stuff but as soon as you adopt this to another controller it only becomes an access point and I think that's going to disappoint a lot of people who were really hoping for something like a manageable dream router I would absolutely kill for a product like the dream router that I can adopt to a hosted controller because that would be everything having a router access point little switch all built into one unit just disable its controller and give that to me and I think a lot of people were hoping for that with UniFi Express which it doesn't deliver again when adopted to any other controller this guy is simply a 2x2 access point Point that's about on par with the U6 light so take that for what you will but I am incredibly happy to see that it does still have that as a feature now for the easiest adoption experience of this guy to another system if you do want to use it in access point mode is you can run set and form but you can also adopt it through Bluetooth if you have a Bluetooth capable access point already adopted to the system you're trying to adopt this guy too it's going to do it Discovery over Bluetooth and Link right on up and that Bluetooth does allow for really easy setup and I talked about how this guy would be super useful in a tech bag and I'm going to elaborate on that a little bit more currently in my tech packout that I keep with me on every job site I have a dream router now I keep this guy on hand because I can quickly reset it and have a second router for troubleshooting uh the switch do whatever I need to do quickly reset this and control it off from my phone and that is super useful rather than it being a cloud managed device and by Cloud managed I mean adopted to another controller it keeps that management simple and local also for my network in a box my network in a box which I take with me on all of my live events that I do a lot of times doesn't have an internet connection I may be running it simply to create my lighting Network or my Dante Network or my just systems control Network I need to be able to have a local controller running in that system so that way I'm not tied to having an internet connection to change my settings hence why the dream router has been such a useful tool for me and I own multiple of these guys now enter the UniFi Express at approximately this much smaller you can see why I am so happy about this going in my tech bag I do wish that you could use the Gateway when adopted to another controller because that would be incredible and allow this device to truly become a one device that can kind of fit all though I understand that ubiquity May shoehorn themselves and they shoehorn themselves because they offer the UDR for 200 bucks $50 more than this and it removes all those restrictions well you can't adopt it to another controller but who cares this guy is clearly aimed square at those of you who are running ero and Google WiFi This Guy's super fast to deploy and set up out of the box and the idea being you can just buy more of these to create a Wi-Fi mesh system and I think that's where we encounter the second main issue and the biggest complaint I have with this little guy and that is that you can only adopt four additional ubiquity devices to this thing's built-in controller and that is another first for ubiquity enforcing a hard device cap now that's not the end of the world seeing as UniFi Express is clearly marketed towards people that have ero devices Google Wi-Fi your traditional little Wi-Fi mesh system buy one of these pull it out of the box use it you want to add more to your system pull another one out of the box and adopt it one device you just buy a bunch of them and you build your little mesh system and I would always take the UniFi option over any of those other ones aside from Asus Asus actually has a surprisingly good little home wi-fi system but now ubiquity does too but they also have the dream router which for $50 more removes that device limit you are limited to four adoptable devices on this a first free ubiquity nowhere else do they hard limmit your devices the dream router I can just keep adopting devices until this thing crashes the dream machine I can just adopt devices until it crashes the network controller application I can just adopt devices until things crash and I think that's one of the things they were trying to avoid here now I was talking to some buddies and we were talking about the four device limit and one of them brought up a really good point in that it's a good distinguishing Mark as to where this guy sits in the controller performance tier I do on average four dream machine recoveries and migrations a week of people that deployed a dream machine over adopted devices and are now crashing and running into stability issues number one reason why I don't recommend Dream Machines for businesses if you want the whole UniFi experience get a cloud key and a NextGen Gateway or a cloud key and a Gateway light that way you decouple the controller from the router so that way when the controller starts crashing the router also doesn't go down really awesome this guy clearly shows hey I'm a low powered device you can only adopt four devices to me and that's not the end of the limits that they put in place they also got rid of ips and IDs which is intrusion prevention and intrusion detection if you look at something like the old USG the UniFi security Gateway ubiquity released a device that is fully capable of routing gigabit however when you turn on IPS and IDs your speeds are dropped down to like 80 Meg I have a feeling the same would be true for a device like this only here youbi doesn't give you that switch now I think if ubiquity were to change from something like a hard cap to maybe a soft cap with a warning message once you get above four devices I think that would make this a lot more useful personally I know I would go out and buy literally five more of them right now if that were the case if you could adopt this to another controller and still use it as a Gateway holy crap I would buy out their entire inventory all right now that's enough talking about what the UniFi Express isn't let's talk about what this little guy is with a real world deployment this is my editor Shelby's apartment and this is her current Network system it's all tplink omada with an ER 605 and a EAP 660 HD I had to use the HD access point here because I tried to use the EAP 610 and we were dropping FaceTime calls 20 ft away in the kitchen and what you see is what you get this place is only 750 square ft one bedroom the bathroom kitchen and the living room now seeing as this place is only 750 square feet she has six Wi-Fi devices and one hardwired editing rig the UniFi Express is perfect and I'm pretty sure this is exactly the type of situation ubiquity designed this for and with this being a UniFi router it'll be really easy easy for us to set up the sight tosite VPN so that way she can access all the footage on my Nas for editing so let's get the UniFi Express set up once we get a little Cable Management box down here we'll be all clean and tighty but I've connected the UniFi Express and you can just see the size difference between the equipment that we removed and this even has a little splitter so we're not using two power bricks this is so much smaller with our UniFi Express set up let's go ahead and fire up the UniFi app on my phone and see if we just pick it up hey UniFi Express found let's hit set up we're going to set up a new system we're going to call this we're going to call this remote editor for now for Wi-Fi we'll call this editor and then off camera I'll go ahead and get all these updated and we're just going to make the password capital password and hit connect and in about 2 minutes we're going to have a fully setup Wi-Fi network so in the meantime I'm going to fire up the computer and let's get to the main web interface where we can take a look at the real settings all right now that we've got the hardware set up the initial Wi-Fi created I've gone ahead and connected on my laptop and I've got unifii pulled up here so we can go ahead and Connect into our Network now that we're logged into the system we're going to go ahead and first configure the guest Wi-Fi network then we're going to take a look at the missing IPS and IDs settings as well as configure a sight tosite VPN so we can see our UniFi Express right here we have spectrum and let's go ahead and take a look at settings we have our Wi-Fi network I'm going to go ahead and create a new network we're going to create new and we're going to call this guest we're going to create a new subnet 1921 let's make this 10. 23.0 or. 2.1 sl24 manual VLAN 2 that's fine multicast DNS yes we want to enable that and add we're then going to come in and create a new Wi-Fi network we're I have absolutely no idea why the okay here we go I'm continuing all right we're going to create a new Wi-Fi network create new editor guest password 1 2 3 4 5 6 78 we'll change this all later change network to guest and manual settings where we want client device isolation that's going to be what stops devices on the guest network from talking to each other as well as devices on our main Network and we're going to go ahead and click on add Wi-Fi network all right now that we have the guest Wi-Fi network setup let's go ahead and take a look at our firewall insecurity and you can see just how lackluster the settings are as again IPS and IDs intrusion prevention and intrusion detection are both missing from this device and again I think that's because this is a slower device that's probably not up to the task of handling all of the things we're asking it to do at once all right the next thing we're going to do is we're going to come down here and create a port IP group and we're going to create the RFC 1918 group now rfc1918 addresses are all private IP addresses and we can use this to create a really easy block group so that way we don't have to block one network from the other we can just block them from all private networks so we're going to create 10.0.0.0 sl8 we're going to create 172.16.0.0 sl12 and we're going to create 192.168.0.0 sl16 and hit add and we can just create our our little firewall rule real quick come into firewall security Lan we want to do new entry type Lan in we're going to call this block guest from RFC drop Source type Network and we want to select Our Guest Network and our destination is our port and IP group rfc1918 and now the guest Network truly cannot connect to any private IPS and now that we have our basic settings such as our guest net Network add blocking and our firewall rules all done we're going to go ahead and set up the site to site VPN and see how easy that is with something like the UniFi Express and the dream machine that I have running at my office so if we come back into our UniFi OS site settings let's go to site magic and set up a new VPN and you can see we have Miller media HQ as well as remote editor so let's go ahead and select both of these devices and we'll call this Miller media S2s add and we want the Miller media Land network to be able to talk to the remote editor default Network and we're going to connect we're going to let these guys provision and we should be good to go all right we can see that the site to site VPN has been established and now none of her networks can talk to each other but her main Network can see my Nas as well as with her user permissions on my Nas that should keep things nice and secure super simple and even more comp than the old TPL link Hardware was now while I would love to sit down and say great we're done this is the perfect UniFi Express installation this thing is great go buy one even here where this is the perfect installation location as we have one hardwired device a small area to cover with Wi-Fi we should still probably be looking at upgrading to the dream router simply for UniFi protect this place is a small apartment that two cameras would cover perfectly put one in the window sill aimed outside to cover the front door put one on the inside aimed out the back window which is the only other point of entry into the home and all of a sudden you have an increased peace of mind and a really easy management platform for your cameras so for 50 bucks more we could upgrade to the UDR and then put in two Wi-Fi cameras no problem so for right now the UniFi Express is going to be taking care of my remote editor but even in this small of a configur configuration we're still looking to upgrade but anyway guys thank you all for watching if you enjoyed this video go ahead and drop a like if you really liked it and want to see more of me and your subscription fee but then you can go ahead and get subscribed I'll have links down in the description all the products that I talked about mostly the udy Express and the dream router not any of this TP Link equipment but if you guys have any other ideas as to where this stuff would be useful go ahead and drop a comment and let me know where could you use a platform like this or do you think ubiquity limited themselves too hardcore but anyway guys thank you all for watching and I will see you in the next [Music] one

Channel: Miller Technical Services

Views: 19,210

Keywords: tech, unifi, ubiquiti, computer, it, av, production, server, installation, review, camera, miller, technical, services, jack, jack miller, miller technical services, network, networking, ubuntu, linus, nas, proxmox, pfsense, router

Id: Xf6PycK3mY0

Length: 16min 41sec (1001 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 11 2024