Unifi Dream Machine Pro

Over the years i’ve had a love / hate relationship with Ubiquiti, mainly to do with their tech support which has been attrocious in my experience. Sorry i am old school, i like being able to call someone to ask for help when i need it, and all that ubiquiti can offer is a forum.

I thought i’d found the best combination of hardware and support in the Dell N-series switches, sadly Dell discontinued the 1100 series which were reasonably priced, had a great GUI / CLI interface, and as always with Dell a great on-site support package thrown in.

The general smart home community seems to love the unifi kit, so i thought i’d give it a go. 3 weeks ago i bought a Dream Machine Pro to replace a Pfsense firewall, i had planned to buy the whole stack of switches, AP’s and router, but stock levels are a little low in places. I like to buy from distributors but none had any in stock.

So as it was the only thing i could source from a distributor I’ve switched the router out and I have to say I am quite impressed with it.

My first attempt at the install wasn’t exactly a raging success, I got the app installed on my iphone, started the process and it fell over several times, for some reason I just couldn’t get the bluetooth connected for any length of time. After 3 attempts I gave up and decided to go old school and install with a web browser. Within 10 minutes it was setup and ready to go.

Its been in a couple of weeks now and here’s what i like so far:

I like the interface, though it does seem to be missing things it used to have, the built in Unifi controller is useful, so one less box in the rack. Its a very quiet box, although its installed in the loft, its nice not to be able to hear it. The 1.25 inch screen is quite cool, and i see it being useful on switches to identify them.

What don’t i like about it? its more the ability to find out technical info on the unit, I recently upgraded my internet connection to a Virgin’s Gig1 service, i spent a few days trying to work out why it’s maximum throughput was 850mbit, (when i get a good 950+ mbit when plugging a machine in directly to the Superhub 4) turns out once you turn on the Threat Management features on a UDM max throughput goes down to 850mb. I think my system is a little confused as it says UDM-Pro should handle 3.5Gbps.