The reason most people go with Ubiquiti for home use is the price -- that Aruba switch costs $3500 new. The ubiquiti switch costs about 1/10th that at $399.

Can you get free firmware updates from Aruba or do you need a support contract?

I guess I could have pointed it out more clearly: I'm going "used enterprise" as the route for replacement. As you say, yes, this switch was $2500 new (that's what I saw when I looked), but I bought one for under $100 on ebay.

Similarly for the Ruckus R610 AP I mentioned: Those APs were a grand new, but you can get them for a bit over $100 on ebay. Linus Tech Tips did a comparison of it with other consumer units, doing heavy multi-device streaming, and Ruckus was the clear winner.

Yes, Ubiquiti looks like a good value and they make some very interesting products. I've used some of them to great effect over the years. But my experience with the NVR and cameras and switch and Cloud Key has been relatively bumpy. Enough so that I'm ready to ditch the convenience for up-front loading and hopefully day-to-day more realible.

That is a good price for the hardware, but what about the firmware? Do Aruba and Ruckus give free firmware updates?

Have you looked at the power consumption of the switch? I've run some enterprise gear at home in the past (my favorite was the E-450 Sun server which an ex-employer gave me for free), but when I started paying for my own power, I found that even if the hardware is free, the power consumption makes it expensive.

Looks like Aruba has the most recent firmware available for download here: https://h10145.www1.hpe.com/Downloads/SoftwareReleases.aspx?...

Most recent version is a couple years old, but it was EOLed 3 years ago.

Ruckus firmware seems to be downloadable from their main product page for the R610, updated a month ago.

Re power consumption, it looks like the Aruba pulls around 50W idle, and the Ubiquiti pulls 29W idle. Of course, if I can get rid of the second switch I've been running because the Ubiquiti keeps blocking the Google WiFi ports, that brings it even closer. :-)

You do have to sign up with an account at HP to get the firmware, and it won't let you use a gmail account, but once I signed up I was able to download the latest firmware and update to the latest. Just FYI.

You can get S2500-24P from eBay for 125 US or so each.

I hear these are great little boxes for running PFSence and OPNSense

https://protectli.com/

There's also Netgate hardware, which has the added benefit of supporting development of pfSense. I have the SG-3100 and have been very happy with it.

https://www.netgate.com/

Takes a bit of searching to find the hardware section (it's under products->appliances) https://www.netgate.com/products/appliances/

Do any of these pfsense setups allow an Orbi-style network? I’ve been really unhappy with my last several router purchases.

No, you'd still need a 3rd party like Orbi or Ubiquiti. I'm running a few Ubiquiti FlexHD's in mesh and have yet to have any issues.

we're happy you're happy!

I've never used those ones but I can recommend these ones (originally from the US, moved to Switzerland): https://pcengines.ch

Second these guys; really easy to set up (though I did have a nightmare getting a reliable USB-R232 converter for the initial bootstrap).

Not sure if you found a good one, this one has never failed me: http://amzn.com/B00425S1H8

With a male/male extension: http://amzn.com/B00QM8ZP5E

Will take a look at it!

My current one I've nicknamed a "Pirate" R232 adapter because it has an unfortunate and hilarious effect of duplicate the lowercase 'r' character for some reason (so I see Arrrrrrrrchlinux).

I mostly administer via SSH so it's all good at the moment.

That's hilarious.

Thanks for the pointer. I was planning on running under a VM. A dedicated box would be nice from just a reboot standpoint. I was looking at getting one or two of those HP COMPAQ ELITE 8300 boxes off ebay for $200, but they probably only have one Network interface, so I might want to add another.

I have two, and yes, they are freaking amazing. I run CentOS on mine.

I don't usually run any services since I prefer to dedicate boxes to things, but I have in the past run a number of services, including minecraft and minetest on it and it flies. Really pleased with it.

What will you do now that CentOS support is going away?

white label brand. You can get those boxes from alibaba for <$100. There are intel/amd/arm versions.

Blue Iris is a great piece of software and Ken the developer has constantly improved it. I think there's a way to get the RTSP stream from your existing cameras.

One of the slick things you can do is add machine learning to it and have motion alerts based on what is detected in the video (person, car, bear, those are some of the built-in options). That looks pretty slick.

I'm trying to recall, but maybe someone else can answer: do the UniFi cameras stream RTSP directly still, or do you still have to run their controller and re-stream it?

Log into the WebUI, set it to whatever the non-Unifi Video mode is, update the firmware, repeat, set your RTSP config, good to go.

I use Blue Iris with my Ubiquiti cameras. Works like a champ.

This sounds good, but are there any good alternatives to BlueIris that would run on a Linux server?

I'm not aware of one, but would be interested if there was. I'd prefer to run it on Linux. Zoneminder seems to be the common recommendation, but most discussions I've seen of it have not been very positive.

There's Xeoma and Blue Cherry, neither of which I know very much about. Never heard anyone mention either of them. So I figured BlueIris was what I'd try. Seems to be what everyone on YouTube is using...