Comment by elevation
1 day ago
I'm glad to see UBNT in this space.
I've always used ZFS because it's vastly superior to other options. When I see storage companies building without fault tolerance, or without a merkle tree (so that you can backup deltas efficiently without having to recompute them) it's a sign their marketing team has more influence over the company than their engineers.
Sadly, the few ZFS COTS options have been somewhat underpowered. QNAP supports ZFS filesystems, but their backup configuration won't let you arrange for a nas to pull from the source (instead of the source doing a push.) You can still pull it off by scheduling your own cron job, but this somewhat defeats the purpose of paying extra for a vendor solution.
UBNT is still supporting my 15 year old edgerouters with security updates, and their interface is clean and usable for anyone with basic network experience. And their video surveillance solutions are unusual in that they allow you to keep your footage entirely onsite and offline, an uncommon level of privacy. If they can bring the same polish to their storage solutions, I'll be using these new products for a long time.
QNAP unforgivably uses a proprietary version of ZFS with their own extensions that are not compatible with mainline OpenZFS. It can only zfs send/receive to other QNAP devices. While your data is protected like any other ZFS system, it is _NOT_ interoperable. You can not take a zpool out of a QNAP system and access it on another system with ZFS. I discovered this painfully the hard way, and won't buy from them again, unless I plan to wipe the software and run something open.
I think the ZFS changes were due to needing a way to allow qnap systems to expand zfs pools. The raidz expansion features in openzfs probably took too long for qnap to wait.
OpenZFS released the zpool expansion as stable last year. Hopefully QNAP is charting a path to allow their users to migrate from their fork to OpenZFS, though of course these kinds of things take time to develop. I would be really worried if they are diverging further from OpenZFS rather than converging.
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I'll be snide and say it: "OpenZFS" and "stable" rarely belong in the same sentence (even though they seem to have a true 2.2 LTS these days).
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Amusingly, most of my old qnap hardware ran Ubuntu pretty well
The same is true for our AI processing on the cameras. This is entirely local and private. You can even air gap the UniFi Protect system from the Internet and it'll operate fine.
> This is entirely local and private. You can even air gap the UniFi Protect system from the Internet and it'll operate fine.
One week ago 3 guys broke into my shop while I was traveling. They had sense enough to power down the starlink that was providing internet which would have taken out all of the remote camera options.
They did not realize that almost everything they were doing was being recorded via the unifi system. In the end about the only thing of value left in the building was the hard drive with all of their pictures on it.
The police have used the footage to identify all of them and it will be pretty open and shut when they see a court room. Offline and air gapped the whole time they were there but did exactly what it was installed to do.
How did you hide it so that the thieves didn't find it?
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Any video surveillance system is foiled by a simple mask. Thieves who know to plan a break-in when you're away usually do their homework and come prepared.
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I am unable to accept that it is fully local, since you have to bind your network to their cloud just to accept the EULA. [0] I have 0% trust that a subsequent unbind truly severs the link, because this is such a shady thing to require in the first place.
[0] https://community.ui.com/questions/e3d50641-5c00-4607-9723-4...
I'm surprised this is required. Agreed that's shady. I wonder what their reasoning is.
But if you don't trust it, the fix is easy: just deny the Ubiquiti cameras and controller all internet access. That way no trust is required.
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So once you accept the EULA, it's fully local. What's your problem with that ?
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I've been so impressed with Ubiquiti that I've decided to target FreeBSD for my current side project. Their camera system is wonderful. Their DreamMachine is a massive upgrade for my home network. Their APs are rock solid, no hassle, just work, and it integrates so well. I have my work / home on different subnets. I have the kids on a different subnet and behind a firewall providing some protection against ads.
Very happy customer here.
>I've been so impressed with Ubiquiti that I've decided to target FreeBSD for my current side project.
As much as I wish Ubnt are using BSD in their product, which they are not. I am understanding how FreeBSD relates here.
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Now if only Ubiquiti could solve the problem where everything is always out of stock.
Any way to get Protect iOS notifications if using local mode only? Eg, using local local login but away from home.
The processing can happen within the camera, and it's nice when it does...but that doesn't mean that the only other option is something cloud-based, like some might assume.
Open-source NVR software like Frigate can do things like the object-detection/license plate/face recognition game on local hardware, with the cheapest available IP cameras. It's just a program that runs on a computer with a network and some storage and some processing ability like a GPU.
Those cheap cameras don't have to be trusted; with things like VLANs, they can hang out on the Group W bench where they have no access to anything important or the outside world. :)
(But yeah, it does represent much more of a DIY effort than something from UBNT does.)
I do like the onboard AI, and it works well for entity detection (like people). We haven't found the face detection to be very reliable in outdoor security applications. There doesn't seem to be a way to correct/combine classes if someone's detected as multiple individuals on different occasions, so we end up with the same person detected as 5 "unknown"s. This is not a hard problem to solve. You'd just allow embedding matching to different face groups, but it's annoying as a user.
Hey, why can't I get full-resolution 4k snapshots off my G5 Pro bullet?
Can I use it without running some inane management VM?
Unifi gateways run the management software now, typically they'll also be your networks router and so something you'll need to buy anyway, but if you just want to use the security/wifi elements then you can either run it in a container or if you're really determined not to run a container and not to buy a router there's the CloudKey.
The UDM runs mine, but prior to that I ran a Docker container with it. It worked well.
https://hub.docker.com/r/linuxserver/unifi-controller
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Genuine question, if you're running unifi, why don't you want the management vm? Synology makes a decent NAS without the controller.
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The cost is just insane though. $4-$500 for a camera that I can get equivalent specs for $50-100.
With face detection? License plates? Tamper protection?
I'm guessing you're thinking Reolink or other Chinese ultra-commodity cam. It's fine, it's just in a different product class and ecosystem - and that's where enterprises fit in, they want that support+ecosystem and not DIYing.
Reolink CX820 8MP $129 https://reolink.com/product/cx820/
Unifi G6 8MP ~$300 https://techspecs.ui.com/unifi/physical-security/uvc-g6-dome...
Avigilon H6A 8MP ~$1200 https://www.avigilon.com/security-cameras/h6a-dome
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IME those sub-$100 Chinese IP cameras have you at the mercy of whatever firmware they cut from the master branch the week they shipped it. People don't buy UI because they win on specs-per-dollar. They buy it because they win on results-per-dollar.
You've clearly not owned many IP cameras, especially not outdoor cameras that go through true seasonal weather. Now, I will say that the first generation of cameras from Ubiquiti were just OK everything after the 3rd generation has been very good overall.
As others have pointed out they are supported for a long time. I have some earlier generations cameras that are going on 7 years of updates. Not only are you barely getting maybe a year of firmware updates at the $50-100 range but there's no comparison on the quality of the optics, sensor and overall hardware at that price differential.
Ubiquiti has done some shitty things over the years but Ubiquiti isn't competing against the $50-100 market. They're competing against the Axis and Panasonic quality builds. You've definitely got it backwards here.
And while, yes, you can get a decent camera from Reolink and the like at a good price it isn't surrounded by an exceptionally mature and well supported ecosystem that has yet to nickel and dime its customers with half ass SaaS and paid for features.
This comment couldn't be further from the reality of Ubiquiti's lineup in comparison.
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They're not all $500, some are $150-300. Overall price comparable to Honeywell, but more than, say, Lorex.
All the basic G6 cameras are in the $200 range and have edge compute?
What's the comparison at $50-100?
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> QNAP supports ZFS filesystems
Do they have ecc on those models? Do you have an example model on hand?
ECC support depends on the processors that the NAS uses. A few of their NASes allow you to use ECC memory but you'd need to swap the memory installed to ECC memory. A lot of their systems use Intel cpus that don't support ECC at all so you need to carefully pick and choose.
Don't buy a QNAP if you care about real ZFS. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48593360
> You can not take a zpool out of a QNAP system and access it on another system with ZFS.
Too bad... I always wonder why companies do this...
Some do. I got the TS-873A a few years back, it works. Their software is kind of weird, and I wouldn't connect it to their cloud offering, but it does work.
What's UBNT?
Obviously it's the singular form of Ubuntu. Like, one "ubunt", two "ubuntu", etc.
one ubuntone, two ubuntwo
Stock symbol for Ubquiti, the company being discussed.
The stock symbol for Ubiquiti is actually UI, not UBNT. UBNT was the symbol for the old name that hasn't been used since 2019. I have no idea why changing the name also changed the stock symbol, but shrug
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Thanks. I wish people could just say the company name instead of using random aliases, but I guess it's some sort of cultural thing.
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Ubiquity Networks Inc.