Unifi Basics: Initial Adoption and Setup

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.

Welcome back to Unifi Basics. This is a new series where I&#39;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&#39;re actually gonna get hands-on and do an initial adoption of equipment and we&#39;re gonna set up a very standard Unifi Network. All right, we&#39;ve got a lot to cover, so let&#39;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&#39;re working with. It&#39;s as easy as opening up a ticket online at rogue.support and remember, you don&#39;t pay anything until your issue is resolved. Give it a shot today, you won&#39;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&#39;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&#39;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&#39;ll throw into the mix. I&#39;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&#39;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&#39;m gonna do in this video, and your installation experience will be much smoother. So starting with the Cloud Gateway Ultra, we&#39;re first going to plug in our internet connection. And in this case, I&#39;m using T-Mobile home internet. But you&#39;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&#39;re gonna wanna plug in power, and then give the gateway about two minutes or so to boot up completely. Once it&#39;s completely booted up, you will see an indication on the screen that it&#39;s ready to set up. Once you&#39;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&#39;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&#39;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&#39;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&#39;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&#39;d like to purchase or visit Rogue Support if this setup is proving to be too challenging. We&#39;d love to help you out. Once your gateway has updated and rebooted, it&#39;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&#39;s talk about directly connecting to the gateway with a laptop or desktop computer. When the gateway is ready for setup, you&#39;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&#39;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&#39;s what&#39;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&#39;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&#39;s gonna want you to create a UI account which is fine if you don&#39;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&#39;m not gonna restore from backup, I&#39;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&#39;ve set this same gateway up multiple times, right? UniFi knows this and it&#39;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&#39;re gonna see your newly created gateway in the cloud portal, it&#39;s also known as the site manager and then you can start configuring. For the purposes of this video, I&#39;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&#39;ll also see tabs for whichever UniFi apps you have installed. Now in this case, it&#39;s only UniFi network but finally there&#39;s a button that looks like a server or a call gear and that is UniFi OS. So let&#39;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&#39;re in UniFi OS and you have application selected, you&#39;re shown which applications can be installed on this particular device. So in my case, it&#39;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&#39;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&#39;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&#39;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&#39;s run our UniFi network update which should take just a couple of minutes. Once it&#39;s done, you&#39;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&#39;s UniFi account and they&#39;re gonna receive an invite. Once they&#39;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&#39;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&#39;m gonna create an admin called UniFi admin and I&#39;m gonna give it a strong password. Now, if I ever need to log in locally, I&#39;ve got an extra account that I can use. Since this is a basics video, I&#39;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&#39;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&#39;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&#39;s a good idea to leave this on. If your device ever fails, you&#39;re gonna have a recent backup that you can use to restore your configuration to a new gateway. Or if you&#39;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&#39;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&#39;s now flip over to UniFi network. On the dashboard, we have menu items down the left hand side, we&#39;ve got a picture of our device in the upper left and it also displays the gateway&#39;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&#39;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&#39;t gonna be very interesting for now since we don&#39;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&#39;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&#39;t want specific devices to be able to hit social media sites, you can set that here and we&#39;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&#39;re gonna cover just yet, but we&#39;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&#39;s hop down to the bottom of the left-hand menu and click on settings. And again, we&#39;re not gonna go over every single setting in UniFi network, but I&#39;m gonna cover kind of what you wanna look at if it&#39;s your first time setting up UniFi. Notice that Wi-Fi is disabled for now. Now this is because we haven&#39;t yet added our access points, so we&#39;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&#39;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&#39;s the only network that you&#39;re gonna be administering, but if you ever wanna do something like VPN multiple sites together, you&#39;re probably gonna wanna change the default. So let&#39;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&#39;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&#39;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&#39;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&#39;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&#39;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&#39;re unsure about anything that I just said, again, these settings are optional. If you just take the default settings, you&#39;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&#39;ve set up our main LAN subnet, but let&#39;s also add a guest network. So this way, when people visit and they want to connect to Wi-Fi, they&#39;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&#39;t be used nearly as much as your main LAN. But let&#39;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&#39;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&#39;ve configured our main network and we&#39;ve configured a guest network. Let&#39;s move on to internet settings. Underneath your internet settings, there really isn&#39;t much to do here unless you have multiple internet connections. This is where you&#39;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&#39;re not gonna cover VPNs in this video, I&#39;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&#39;t really have any visibility into or control over what is actually blocked but I mean, it&#39;s better than nothing. The next setting is DNS shield which when you set it to auto, it&#39;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&#39;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&#39;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&#39;d probably never notice the difference. You&#39;d have to be pushing a lot of traffic before the gateway performance starts to drop. If you&#39;ve made any changes here, make sure you hit apply before moving on. Okay, so now we&#39;ve set up the foundation of our unified network. If your brain is spinning from all of this information, I&#39;d recommend pausing the video here and taking a break. I&#39;ll wait. Okay, no, I&#39;m just kidding. Let&#39;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&#39;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&#39;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&#39;t matter which port. And then I&#39;m gonna plug in the power. Now if your switch is brand new, it&#39;s gonna show up in unified network ready for adoption. But if it&#39;s ever been connected to a different unified network like this one has, you&#39;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&#39;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&#39;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&#39;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&#39;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&#39;s adopt our first access point. And keep in mind that if you don&#39;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&#39;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&#39;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&#39;ve adopted the access point, it&#39;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&#39;re creating, we&#39;re just gonna use default. Leave everything else default and click add Wi-Fi network. Now let&#39;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&#39;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&#39;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&#39;t be able to see or communicate with other client devices in that same guest network. Now, normally you wouldn&#39;t wanna enable client device isolation because you&#39;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&#39;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&#39;re gonna call it guests and then we&#39;re gonna lock it down to 10 megabits per second, upload and download. Now, when we go back to the previous tab, we&#39;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&#39;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&#39;ve created our wireless networks, your client devices can now connect to the wireless network. So congratulations, right? We&#39;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&#39;re only 29 bucks. They can be powered up with PoE and they&#39;re perfect for behind your TV to wire up all your streaming boxes, your gaming consoles and other entertainment stuff that&#39;s better wired so that you&#39;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&#39;s done, it&#39;ll show up in unify and it&#39;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&#39;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&#39;re dialed in properly. Okay, if you&#39;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.

Transcript for:Unifi Basics: Initial Adoption and Setup

Transcript for:
Unifi Basics: Initial Adoption and Setup