I bought into the ecosystem while taking my networking cert classes back in 2017. They were much cheaper than Cisco gear for business-grade networking, and overall I’ve been happy with them.

Their security offerings are locally managed, and you can make local accounts, but I just bought a NAS from them and I had to sign in with my ubiquiti account first before I could make a local account, and it seems the cloud account has some privileges that you can’t give to local super admins.

So now I’m having second thoughts. I figure since it’s enterprise-grade stuff they can’t really make it cloud-dependent like you see on the consumer side since a lot of companies need air-gapped networks. On the other hand, on those occasions that I didn’t have internet access and hadn’t yet made a local-only account, I was locked out, so…

Regarding the NAS specifically, I use a TruNAS system at work and it works well enough on a rack server, but since it uses ZFS I don’t know it would be good for home use. What alternatives are there?

Are there any truly FOSS networking options? I figure especially on the switching side you need purpose-built hardware, right? There aren’t generic motherboards with 48 network ports you can buy.

I like my Unifi setup, I’m just scared of a rug pull.