Original subtitles

Welcome back to Unifi Basics.

This is a new series where I'm fully configuring

a unified network here in the middle of 2024.

In our last video, I discussed everything

that you need to know before getting started

with Unifi Network.

And in this video, we're actually gonna get hands-on

and do an initial adoption of equipment

and we're gonna set up a very standard Unifi Network.

All right, we've got a lot to cover, so let's get started.

Networking can be confusing and difficult,

but lucky for you, expert help is available

with Rogue Support by Crosstalk Solutions.

Our friendly expert technicians are standing by

to assist with your networking needs,

no matter what your setup looks like

and no matter what equipment you're working with.

It's as easy as opening up a ticket online at rogue.support

and remember, you don't pay anything

until your issue is resolved.

Give it a shot today, you won't be disappointed.

For this video, I am going to be starting

with the UCG Ultra as the gateway.

This is also known as the Cloud Gateway Ultra.

I also have a Switch Ultra.

This one happens to be the 210-watt power adapter version,

but for home users, I actually recommend

the cheaper Switch Ultra that has the 60-watt power adapter

since you're probably not gonna need too many PoE

or power over ethernet ports.

PoE is used to power up devices such as wireless access

points or surveillance cameras that can get their power

and data through a single ethernet cable.

The 60-watt Switch Ultra is a PoE switch

and it can easily power two or three of these PoE devices.

For the access point, I'm gonna be going with the U6 Plus.

Now, this is my go-to access point for home users

since it has twice the bandwidth of the U6 Lite,

but it only costs about 30 bucks more.

Now, if you watched my last Unified Basics video,

which was an overview of Unified Network,

as well as an explanation of my recommended

equipment selection for beginners,

this is the exact same setup that I used in that video.

In fact, I even have a Flex Mini Switch

that we'll throw into the mix.

I'm gonna pop a link to all of this equipment down below

in the description of the video.

All right, so the first thing that you wanna do

when building your Unified Network

is to start with the gateway,

since this is the brains of the operation.

This Cloud Gateway Ultra has Unified Network built in,

so we don't have to worry about a separate controller.

You may want to immediately dive in

and hook up all of your equipment at once,

but I would urge a little bit of patience here.

Hook up one device at a time,

just like I'm gonna do in this video,

and your installation experience will be much smoother.

So starting with the Cloud Gateway Ultra,

we're first going to plug in our internet connection.

And in this case, I'm using T-Mobile home internet.

But you're likely gonna have some sort of modem

from your ISP that allows you to plug an ethernet cable

into the WAN port of the gateway.

Next, you're gonna wanna plug in power,

and then give the gateway about two minutes or so

to boot up completely.

Once it's completely booted up,

you will see an indication on the screen

that it's ready to set up.

Once you're at that stage, there are two different ways

that you can bring your gateway online

and associate it with your UniFi account,

which, by the way, if you don't yet have a UniFi account,

you can create one by going to ui.com

and then clicking on the account icon

in the top right-hand corner.

Then you wanna click Sign Up.

So it's free to create an account,

but make sure you have a nice, strong password

since this account is gonna provide access

to your internal network settings.

You should also set up multi-factor authentication

since Ubiquiti is mandating multi-factor authentication

as of July 2024.

The first of the two ways to get your gateway online

is to use the UniFi app for iOS or Android.

You can find that in the Apple App Store

or the Google Play Store.

Download the app and then log into the app

with your UniFi account credentials.

If you're within Bluetooth range of the gateway,

it should automatically pop up as a device

available for adoption in the app.

All you need to do is click on the blue Setup button

to get started.

And I wanna be clear here too, right?

So I'm using the Cloud Gateway Ultra in this video,

but this process is gonna be exactly the same

for any other UniFi gateway that has UniFi OS built in.

And you can refer back to my previous UniFi Basics video

for more information on how to find all of those models.

After you click Set Up,

you will be asked to name your gateway.

You can name it really whatever you want.

And then just click Next,

which is gonna fire off a speed test

to measure your internet connection.

Click Next again once that speed test is complete

and UniFi OS will be set up on the gateway.

Now, if your device needs a firmware update at this point,

it will also automatically get you

to the latest stable firmware version.

This can take some time

and as we know, a watched pot never boils.

So step away for a bit and come back

like five or 10 minutes later and it should be good to go.

You can maybe go check out the UI product selector

to figure out the next UniFi device you'd like to purchase

or visit Rogue Support

if this setup is proving to be too challenging.

We'd love to help you out.

Once your gateway has updated and rebooted,

it's now gonna be online

and you will see it in the UniFi app

and now you can start configuring everything.

But remember, I said there were two ways

to initially configure your gateway.

We covered using the UniFi app

and now let's talk about directly connecting to the gateway

with a laptop or desktop computer.

When the gateway is ready for setup,

you'll see a note on the screen about desktop setup

and it shows you the IP address

that you need to connect to

in order to start the setup process.

This is typically gonna be 192.168.1.1.

So first connect your computer to one of the gateway's LAN

or local area network ports with an ethernet cable.

And you wanna make sure that your computer is set up

to receive its IP address automatically from the gateway.

That's what's known as the DHCP server

which is already set up for you on the gateway.

Next thing you wanna do is open up your browser

and navigate to the IP address

that's on the front screen of the gateway

which again is 192.168.1.1.

Go ahead, pass the security warnings

and this brings you to the initial desktop setup

of the device.

From here, the steps are actually very similar

to the UniFi app method.

You give your device a name and then you sign in.

Now by default, it's gonna want you to create a UI account

which is fine if you don't have one yet

but if you have already created your UI account,

instead you wanna click on sign in

at the bottom right hand corner.

Once you authenticate, you may be asked

if you want to restore from backup.

Now in our case, we wanna set this thing up brand new

so I'm not gonna restore from backup,

I'm gonna choose continue without backup.

It then runs an internet speed test

and I got an extra screen which you may or may not see

since I've set this same gateway up multiple times, right?

UniFi knows this and it's gonna ask me

if I wanna keep the same network subnet

that I had previously which I do, right?

So click finish and UniFi OS will be set up on the gateway

in about a minute or so.

And of course, if you do have firmware updates available,

it will also run through that process

which might add another five minutes to the setup.

Now once this setup is complete,

either through the desktop or through the app,

you now no longer have to connect to the gateway

using the IP address.

You can just open up a browser

from any computer in the world

and navigate to https colon slash slash unifi.ui.com.

Once you log in, you're gonna see your newly created gateway

in the cloud portal, it's also known as the site manager

and then you can start configuring.

For the purposes of this video,

I'm gonna be doing all of the configuration

in a web browser but just be aware that most

if not all of these settings can also be found

in the UniFi app on your smartphone.

When you log into your gateway,

you should see a drop down box

in the upper left hand corner.

This allows you to switch between different UniFi gateways

if you have multiple gateways to administer.

You'll also see tabs for whichever UniFi apps

you have installed.

Now in this case, it's only UniFi network

but finally there's a button that looks like a server

or a call gear and that is UniFi OS.

So let's start by clicking on that icon.

UniFi OS is the operating system

that covers all other UniFi applications

such as network, protect, access or talk

along with some others.

When you're in UniFi OS and you have application selected,

you're shown which applications can be installed

on this particular device.

So in my case, it's only UniFi network and Innerspace

which is a way to upload a floor plan

and then design out your Wi-Fi

and surveillance camera coverage for your location.

So you can install apps from this screen

but you can also update apps.

And as we can see, my UniFi network has an update available

which we're gonna run in just a moment.

Below the applications, you can see your UniFi OS version

as well as the release channel.

For most users, you're just gonna wanna leave

the release channel set to official

which is gonna be the most tested and stable version.

I would also recommend enabling auto update

for both UniFi OS and applications

so that you don't ever have to think

about keeping your applications on the latest version.

You can schedule when UniFi OS will check for

and process any available updates.

Okay, so let's run our UniFi network update

which should take just a couple of minutes.

Once it's done, you'll see up to date

underneath UniFi network.

The next left-hand menu item in UniFi OS

is admins and users.

This is where you can add users to UniFi

for all of the various UniFi apps

as well as enable more admins for UniFi.

When you add admins,

you can add someone else's UniFi account

and they're gonna receive an invite.

Once they've accept that invite,

your gateway is now gonna show up

in their UniFi site manager as an additional site

that they can make changes to.

But you can also add local administrators to your gateway

which I typically recommend, right?

So this way, you have kind of like a backdoor

emergency account that you can use

to log into the gateway locally

if something goes wrong

with the UniFi account login process.

To add a local administrator,

click the plus sign in the upper right-hand corner.

Here you can add someone's UI account email

but for a local admin, we wanna check the box

that says restrict to local access only.

And now we can create a username and password

for the new local admin.

I'm gonna create an admin called UniFi admin

and I'm gonna give it a strong password.

Now, if I ever need to log in locally,

I've got an extra account that I can use.

Since this is a basics video,

I'm not gonna cover every single setting

in UniFi OS and UniFi network

but I do wanna touch on some of the settings

that may be useful for folks

who are just setting up UniFi for the first time.

So let's move down to console settings.

In console settings,

we can change the name of our device if we want.

This is the name that appears in the site manager.

So if you're managing multiple UniFi devices

like for clients or for other members of your family,

you would want unique names

that indicate the location of the device

such as a company name or the last name of a client,

really whatever makes the most sense to you.

System config backup is a setting

that takes an automatic weekly backup

of your UniFi settings

and it's a good idea to leave this on.

If your device ever fails,

you're gonna have a recent backup

that you can use to restore your configuration

to a new gateway.

Or if you're super paranoid

about storing your UniFi configuration in the cloud,

you can disable this setting

but then I would recommend periodically

taking a manual backup by using the backup now link.

An optional setting is the LED screen brightness.

Now I know that some folks have their UniFi gateway

perhaps set up in a bedroom

where you wouldn't want the front screen

to be on super bright all the time.

So with these options,

you can adjust the brightness of the screen

and you can also set some night mode hours

where the screen is disabled.

Let's now flip over to UniFi network.

On the dashboard,

we have menu items down the left hand side,

we've got a picture of our device in the upper left

and it also displays the gateway's name

and UniFi OS version.

We can see information about our internet connection.

Now if you have multiple internet connections,

you can switch between them to see the different WAN IPs.

We've got a graph that shows us our internet health

and we can rerun that initial speed test at any time.

The graphs and charts on the main part of the screen

aren't gonna be very interesting for now

since we don't have any other devices

hooked up to UniFi network,

but these will populate over time

as we build out the network.

All right, so going down the left hand menu items,

first we have topology,

which gives us a view of the devices

and clients in our network

and it also shows us what is connected to what, right?

So again, not very interesting right now,

but this will populate as we add more devices and clients.

The next menu item is unified devices,

which shows us, you guessed it, our UniFi devices.

So for now we just have the single gateway.

Clicking on any of the devices in UniFi devices

pops out a menu on the right hand side

that shows us detailed information statistics

about that particular device,

as well as allows us to change some settings.

Next up we have client devices.

So client devices is the same concept as unified devices,

except this is where we can see

all of the connected computers, smartphones, tablets,

and IoT devices on our network.

Clicking on any individual client device

gives us details about that device

and it allows us to change some of the settings

such as the device's name.

If you ever wanted to give one of your devices

a fixed IP address on the network,

this is also where you would do it.

Notice also that we can create traffic rules

for specific devices as well.

So for example, if you didn't want specific devices

to be able to hit social media sites,

you can set that here

and we're gonna cover that in a future video.

Next we have ports, also known as the port manager.

This is where we will manage the ports

in our network switches,

including power over ethernet settings and VLANs.

Again, not something we're gonna cover just yet,

but we'll get to it in the future.

Insights is for system graphs and statistics,

not very interesting yet,

but that will start to populate over time.

So for now, let's hop down to the bottom

of the left-hand menu and click on settings.

And again, we're not gonna go over every single setting

in UniFi network, but I'm gonna cover

kind of what you wanna look at

if it's your first time setting up UniFi.

Notice that Wi-Fi is disabled for now.

Now this is because we haven't yet added our access points,

so we're gonna come back to that one,

but some other gateway devices

might have a wireless access point built in,

like the UniFi Express device.

So you might have Wi-Fi there,

but regardless, we're gonna come back

and touch on that in just a minute.

Clicking on networks, we can see our default LAN

or local area network.

If you click on the word default,

you can bring up more detailed settings.

By default, every UniFi network gateway

starts with a 192.168.1.x subnet, right?

So this is fine if it's the only network

that you're gonna be administering,

but if you ever wanna do something

like VPN multiple sites together,

you're probably gonna wanna change the default.

So let's go ahead and do that now for anyone interested,

but again, this is an optional step.

So first you wanna disable auto-scale network

to open up our settings.

With the slider, you can change the size

of the network subnet or modify how many client devices

can connect to the network.

The default net mask of 24 is really standard,

so I would leave that alone unless you know

what you're doing, but you can change the third octet

of the host address to something different

in order to change the actual numbering scheme

of the subnet.

So for example, if I change the host address

to 192.168.4.1, you'll notice that all of the settings

below follow suit.

Once I apply the change, the IP address

of the gateway changes as well as the IP addresses

that are handed out to any of my client devices

or any of my other unified devices.

If we change advanced to manual instead of auto,

we open up even more settings.

We're gonna talk about guest networks in a moment here,

but you may want to set up content filtering.

Setting it to work, for example, will block pornographic

and malicious domains and it sets search engines

and YouTube to safe mode.

Setting it to family does all of that,

plus it also blocks the use of VPNs

that can bypass these filters.

The last setting that I would recommend reviewing

is the DHCP range.

This is the range of available IP addresses

that the gateway can hand out to your client devices.

So by default, it's set to .6 through .254,

which is fine, but you may want to change this

depending on how many client devices

you need to set statically.

If you don't have any client devices to set statically,

you can move the .6 down to .2.

But if you have more than five client devices

to give static IP addresses to,

you can adjust the .6 up accordingly.

And if you're unsure about anything that I just said,

again, these settings are optional.

If you just take the default settings,

you're gonna be fine in most cases.

If you did make any changes here,

make sure you click apply changes at the bottom

before moving on.

So now we've set up our main LAN subnet,

but let's also add a guest network.

So this way, when people visit

and they want to connect to Wi-Fi,

they're separated out from our main network.

Click on new virtual network

and give the network a name such as guests.

You can let the guest network auto-scale

since it probably won't be used

nearly as much as your main LAN.

But let's flip advanced into manual mode.

You want to check the guest network checkbox.

This setting tells Unifi that you want to isolate

this network from all of your other subnets.

This is automatically gonna create some firewall rules

that allow devices in the guest network subnet

to talk to each other

and they can talk out to the internet,

but they can't talk to any devices in your other subnets.

You may also want to set your content filtering

to work or family for your guests

and then click add at the bottom of the screen.

Okay, so now we've configured our main network

and we've configured a guest network.

Let's move on to internet settings.

Underneath your internet settings,

there really isn't much to do here

unless you have multiple internet connections.

This is where you'll find your dual WAN settings

if you want to set up a secondary internet connection

for failover or load balancing.

The next setting is VPN

and while we're not gonna cover VPNs in this video,

I'm gonna point out that I did a completely separate video

detailing the four different types of VPNs

available in Unifi Network

and I will put a link to that video down in the description

if you want to check it out.

The next setting is security.

Under the general tab, you may want to enable ad blocking,

which scans the DNS requests that your client devices make

and then blocks ad domains automatically.

Now this is very similar to setting up AdGuard home

or a pie hole on your network

but you don't really have any visibility into

or control over what is actually blocked

but I mean, it's better than nothing.

The next setting is DNS shield

which when you set it to auto,

it's automatically gonna try to send client DNS requests

encrypted which increases privacy and security

but it also likely means that the ad blocking

that we just set up is gonna stop working.

So it's kind of a double-edged sword.

The internet safety tab is where you can block

or allow internet traffic from specific countries

and you can also enable suspicious activity detection.

Suspicious activity detection is also known as IDS IPS

or intrusion detection system, intrusion prevention system.

Basically what this means is that

your gateway is gonna attempt to identify

or block potentially harmful traffic.

When you set it to auto, this is intrusion detection.

If any suspicious activity is detected,

you're gonna get notified.

However, if you change auto to advanced,

you can change the filtering mode to notify and block

which is intrusion prevention.

Quick note is that enabling IDS IPS

can affect the performance of the gateway

since it takes extra CPU power

to analyze all of your network traffic.

But honestly for home users,

you'd probably never notice the difference.

You'd have to be pushing a lot of traffic

before the gateway performance starts to drop.

If you've made any changes here,

make sure you hit apply before moving on.

Okay, so now we've set up the foundation

of our unified network.

If your brain is spinning from all of this information,

I'd recommend pausing the video here and taking a break.

I'll wait.

Okay, no, I'm just kidding.

Let's move forward and add a network switch.

This network switch is the Switch Ultra 210 watt

which is a great switch,

but there is a cheaper 60 watt version

that's a better fit for most home users.

The Switch Ultra with the 60 watt power adapter

gives you plenty of power for two or three PoE devices

such as access points or surveillance cameras.

Now to adopt this switch,

I'm first gonna connect an ethernet cable

from one of the LAN ports of my gateway

over to one of the ports of this switch.

It doesn't matter which port.

And then I'm gonna plug in the power.

Now if your switch is brand new,

it's gonna show up in unified network ready for adoption.

But if it's ever been connected

to a different unified network like this one has,

you're gonna have to factory reset it

by sticking a paperclip into the reset hole

and then pressing down the button inside that reset hole

for about 10 seconds.

Once that's been done, you can click on unified devices

and you should see the switch.

Click on click to adopt

and the switch will be added to your unified network

and automatically updated

to the latest firmware version if needed.

Once it's been adopted and up to date,

you can then click on the switch to see info

and change settings.

For example, you might wanna rename the switch

to make it easier to identify

based on the room that it's in.

The switch will now also show up in the port manager

if you need to change port settings or VLAN information.

Additionally, it's gonna now show up in the topology view

where you can also click on individual devices

to see their right hand menu info and settings.

Since we now have our PoE switch in place,

let's adopt our first access point.

And keep in mind that if you don't have a PoE

or power over ethernet switch,

you can still hook up an access point to any switch

as long as you have a PoE injector to provide power.

I've connected the access point to one of the switch ports

with an ethernet cable and we should see it light up.

Now on the Switch Ultra,

you can connect it to any one of these ports

since they all provide power over ethernet,

but on some switches, only some of the ports provide PoEs.

You wanna look at the switch

and make sure you're plugging into one that provides power.

Now, just like the network switch,

if the access point is brand new,

it should automatically show up in unify

and be ready for adoption.

But if not, you can always factory reset it with a paperclip

the same way that we factory reset the switch.

Once you've adopted the access point,

it's now time to create your first wireless network.

Click on settings and you should already be on Wi-Fi.

You can give your wireless network a name

as well as a strong password.

Also, just fun fact, if you want,

you can use emojis in your wireless network name,

which is kind of fun.

Next, you wanna pick the network subnet

that users connecting to this wireless network

are gonna be associated with.

For the first wireless network that we're creating,

we're just gonna use default.

Leave everything else default and click add Wi-Fi network.

Now let's add a second wireless network for our guests.

Click create new and then follow the same process.

Give it a name and password, but this time for network,

we're gonna choose guests

because we want people connecting to this wireless SSID,

this wireless name to be put into our guest network

that we created earlier.

Now, since this is a guest network,

there are a couple of other options

that we may want to consider.

Switch advanced from auto to manual

and let's take a look at some settings.

The first setting is client device isolation.

If you enable this setting,

client devices connected to the guest network

won't be able to see or communicate

with other client devices in that same guest network.

Now, normally you wouldn't wanna enable

client device isolation because you'd wanna cast videos

to your television or print to your printer over wireless.

Client device isolation prevents those things from happening

but it may be what you actually want

on a guest wireless network, right?

So think of like a hotel guest network.

You wouldn't want a bunch of guests staying at the hotel

connecting to the wireless network

and then being able to see all of the other

hotel guests devices on that same network.

Another option here is the Wi-Fi speed limit.

So maybe we wanna lock client devices

connected to the guest network

down to only 10 megabits per second or something.

So to do that, enable Wi-Fi speed limit

and then click create new profile.

This is gonna open up a new browser tab

that allows you to create a speed limit.

We're gonna call it guests

and then we're gonna lock it down

to 10 megabits per second, upload and download.

Now, when we go back to the previous tab,

we're gonna have to refresh it.

So go ahead and click add Wi-Fi network

and then edit it again.

Now, when we enable Wi-Fi speed limit,

we'll see the speed limit profile that we just set up

and we can select it.

The final setting that I wanna bring your attention to

is the Wi-Fi blackout scheduler.

If we turn this on, we can block out times

that the guest wireless network should be disabled.

Companies who allow anyone on their wireless guest network

sometimes only want to allow that network

to be enabled during business hours

and this is where you can set that up.

All right, so now that we've created our wireless networks,

your client devices can now connect to the wireless network.

So congratulations, right?

We're gonna cover some of the more advanced

wireless settings in a future video.

But finally, as a bonus here,

let me adopt one of these flex mini switches.

Now, I love these flex mini switches

because they're only 29 bucks.

They can be powered up with PoE

and they're perfect for behind your TV

to wire up all your streaming boxes, your gaming consoles

and other entertainment stuff that's better wired

so that you're not streaming over wireless.

And just like our other devices,

if you need to factory reset the flex mini,

you just need to stick a paperclip

in the little reset hole on the bottom

and hold it there for about 10 seconds.

Once that's done, it'll show up in unify

and it'll be ready to adopt.

So now you have a great foundation for your unify network

that you can continue to build upon.

And remember to like and subscribe to Crosstalk Solutions

for more videos just like this one.

If you get stuck on anything

or if you'd like expert assistance

getting all this stuff set up for your home or business,

be sure to open up a ticket with rogue support

and one of our friendly expert technicians

will make sure that you're dialed in properly.

Okay, if you'd like to keep this party going,

I have hand selected a couple of videos on the right here

for you to watch next.

The top video is my first unify basics video

where I cover everything that you need to know

in order to get the right equipment for your deployment.

And the bottom video is my complete overview

of the different types of VPN in unified network.