There's a legitimate criticisms to be made of Ubiquiti's products, but they perform very well, are relatively simple to setup and maintain and most importantly for me, you get a perpetual license in the up front purchase price - no annual ransomware like other similar providers. Plus you can host the controller yourself, you don't have to be tied to their cloud offering (if they even still bother with it).

I haven't setup their built-in ad blocking yet as the local DNS was a bit of a pain so I still use pi-hole for all my own home stuff's DNS anyway, and I have wireguard running off their box as I set that up when their implementation was very new and not quite what I was after. But only a matter of time before I switch to the same setup as yours.

*(time till cameras, time till access-points)!

[–] TagMeInSkipIGotThis 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Actually on cameras, I think Ubiquiti are adding Onvif support to Protect which should let you add non-Ubiquiti cameras to their setup too. Of course then you won't get the special detection features so i'll continue to use frigate & offload the "is human?" analysis to a GPU.

[–] Dave 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I've been looking at Reolink with built in detection. Would I still need frigate?

I'd want it integrated with Home Assistant anyway, so might not even need Unifi Protect in the stack.

[–] TagMeInSkipIGotThis 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I really like the frigate project, and the detection models it has are really really good, and that meant I could use really cheap Amcrest (I think) cameras because the brains was on the server end rather than camera end. Plus I kinda prefer the device side to be as dumb as possible as they can often have all sorts of vulnerabilities baked in the more IoT they are.

Though I also really hate Home Assistant so I use Frigate as a standalone app, and I manage notifications in a somewhat roundabout way (mqtt -> loki -> grafana -> pushover). I did that because I got heartily sick of how awful Home Assistant was at determining whether I was, or was not at home.

So now I use Unpoller to get my device states from the UDM, that gets stored in prometheus, and my Grafana alert rule works out if my partner or I are at home based on our device being connected to the WiFi or not; then each MQTT event for a detection it only sends a notification if both phones are away.

[–] Dave 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Haha I fought with Home Assistant on the home/not home thing too. It's really food now, though. I think the issue is HA uses the google significant motion update, so it doesn't get realtime location data but instead updates on some black box google schedule. They have a high accuracy mode but it still doesn't seem to poll regularly. It's unclear to me exactly what changes.

On my phone I also use PhoneTrack synced to Nextcloud for location tracking, and that updates every minute. I think this seems to allow HA to get more frequent updates, as it works great for me now. Still a massive problem on my wife's phone, who has no need for PhoneTrack. Detecting WiFi network is my next plan for her, which you can do in HA as well.

[–] TagMeInSkipIGotThis 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Yeah I was using HA to figure out presence from Unifi and that was very flakey as well. Have a look at Unpoller though, its a decent project and can push metrics to influxdb or prometheus.

[–] Dave 1 points 2 months ago

Will do, thanks!

[–] Dave 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

What trouble did you have with local DNS? I haven't had any issues.

What I like about Pi-hole is the control. With the block ads setting here, it's a checkbox on or off. Pi-hole lets me add custom block lists, and see a log of what's being blocked to help me resolve issues with sites not working.

Annoyingly I have Amplify APs which while made by Ubiquiti they aren't compatible with the Unifi range in terms of controller. They work fine but I have to manage them separately.

[–] TagMeInSkipIGotThis 2 points 2 months ago

Its only recent releases of Unifi Network that have made it easy to setup local DNS entries - it used to be very kludgy or not possible back when I first deployed PiHole as DNS for me.