Well, after a week of preparing myself for the bad news I ended up the week receiving good news – I still have a job! I really feel for my work mates who didn’t make it through although I have heard that a few of them have contacts in their old job so hopefully that’ll translate into a small transition from their current job back to their old job. It has been a stressful few months and I think it’ll continue being stressful as we transition and train now that our job not only covers what we were doing before but also administration work as well. End of the day there was always a plan to downsize and become a more lean and efficient company but I think that the management were hoping that the transition could have been done in a gentle way – that as people left they weren’t replaced rather than having to make people redundant.
I’ve decided after much procrastination to finally replace my Unifi Security Gateway, Unifi Switch and Cloud Key with the Unifi Dream Machine. It is very much a new piece of equipment so the hardware is rock solid but the software is a bit rough around the edges at the moment. Below are photos of the device – it is around the same height of an Apple Airport (the tower one) but slightly wider and heavier. The software is based on Linux but rather than it being based on EdgeOS (which is what USG and other products are dependent on) the UDM software is an in-house firmware. What this means is that although in the short term that’ll mean some rough edges the upside is that because Unifi engineers now control the whole widget it should mean that updates and bug fixes come a lot faster rather than the current situation with older devices where it was email ping-pong to get anything fixed.
The moment there is a big update that is in the works – which will bring UDM and UDM Pro software into sync with each other. I’ll hold off writing a comprehensive review for a few months – give a long term perspective particularly when it comes to software updates. The one aspect I do like is how it is tidied up my office where I had the various devices taking up space on the wall, I’ve been able to replace it all with a single device which looks a lot nicer sitting on the bookshelf.
What I can say is that the wifi signal strength (keeping in mind I have it setup on 5GHz channel 161) isn’t as strong as the Unifi AP AC HD (which I have attached to the ceiling in the living room) but if one were to place it in a centrally located position in a home then it would work perfectly fine. In my case my laptop is connected at 527mbps and that is going through a single wall – for most people that speed is more than sufficient to stream videos, chat, Skype etc. without too many issues.
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