← Back to context

Comment by Spooky23

2 days ago

I love my ubiquity kit, but they annoy me with half finished stuff.

I upgraded my venerable USG with the new UXG as I have gig service now. The gear is great, even supports IPv6, and uses much less power. But… no internal DNS is enabled. So now, I ended up buying a thin client on eBay to roll my own DHCP/DNS. Not fun. It is baffling to me because there’s lots of complex new features in the Unifi stack, and they already had an interface to configure static names in dnsmasq.

I went the Eufy route for cameras as the batteries were a big draw for me.

What DNS features are you missing? Is this a weird UXG limitation?

I have a UCG-Ultra and was able to set up DNS just the way I wanted. My needs aren't extreme, but I was able to set up a wildcard entry (*.apps.domain -> 192.168.x.y) and fixed addresses and DNS names for various hosts.

The configuration is in a non-obvious place now and has moved around a bit over time. Currently it hides in Settings > Policy Engine > DNS. It shows entries that come from the per-host fixed IP/Local DNS configuration (you can't edit these here) and you can create new entries here (like my wildcard or some other random entry).

This was basically why I moved away from them.

I ended up with a bunch of mildly compatible products that were a totally pain to manage. It was _amazing_ when it worked well. It mostly does, but on occasional when things went wrong it was a totally pain pain to fix.

My Tp-link Deco system works just as well for my use case. It occasionally decides to use a terrible channel, but that’s fixed with a quick restart or a few clicks in the app.

  • Yep, now that TP-Link have fixed the weird Deco bug where you couldn't forward more than one (non contiguous) port to the same internal machine I'm very happy with them, the wifi coverage is ridiculously good.

Wait the UXG doesn't do DHCP/DNS? The UCGs all do those which is a weird design choice.

  • UXG definitely does DHCP and DNS.

    • MyUXG Max has DHCP, and for my attached devices if I specify a static IP I get the option to set a Local DNS record.

      There's no central management of these records that I'm aware of though.

      Absolutely love my Unifi setup, recently upgraded my USG to the UXG as the old was EOL and not performant enough for gigabit routing with SPI.