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Comment by radicalbyte | Hacker News Reader

I've been so impressed with Ubiquiti that I've decided to target FreeBSD for my current side project. Their camera system is wonderful. Their DreamMachine is a massive upgrade for my home network. Their APs are rock solid, no hassle, just work, and it integrates so well. I have my work / home on different subnets. I have the kids on a different subnet and behind a firewall providing some protection against ads.

Very happy customer here.

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>I've been so impressed with Ubiquiti that I've decided to target FreeBSD for my current side project.

As much as I wish Ubnt are using BSD in their product, which they are not. I am understanding how FreeBSD relates here.

An assumption, I made. Failed, it was.

I always advise ppl against ubiquiti devices. They are not open at all, its yet another proprietary router/switch/wifi/nas/etc

So what do you actually recommend?

I like unifi despite the appliance feel. I recommend using the kit that works fire you, but avoiding the temptation to stick everything in a single pane of glass. Use the wifi, don't also cram your routing and switching and firewalling into the same vendor relationship.

It's like being apple-everything. Freedom until you bump into the walls of your cell.

Unifi APs are a sweet spot of price/performance, and I have no difficulty recommending them. Ruckus hardware is better at five times the price.

UISP gear has worked very very well for me for ptp and ptmp. But that's a completely different line.

Keeping Linux-based devices up and running and somewhat reliable is horrible. I'm 45, I've spent 25 years doing that. Time I'll never get back. Time I'm spending with my kids instead of dicking around with an obscure bug caused by some random dude who is spending his free time doing thankless work maintaining some C code he wrote 40 years ago.

> They are not open at all

So what ? It's not possible to be reliable, open and have many features.

There's a port of Unifi network controller for both FreeBSD and OpenBSD.

https://www.freshports.org/net-mgmt/unifi10/

https://ports.to/path/net/unifi/main.html

I guess not officially supported but I use them, they work well.

Interesting - but I just run it in docker. I also run opnsense, which is a FreeBSD, and I find it very high friction.

Long time ago I used these BSD-based appliances such as opnsense, beleiving I'll have it easier with their web interfaces than with editing config files in vi.

In the long run, after investing some time into learning actual BSDs I find editing a few config files much more convenient than clicking around in web interfaces.

OpenBSD is great for a router.

https://www.openbsd.org/faq/pf/example1.html

Their camera system isnt awful, but I would still pick Frigate over it (I have the option for both at home and have ran each). Frigate is nice in that it works with any old RTSP IP camera - many features in Unifi's NVR support only work with their own over-priced cameras. High quality PoE cameras are extremely cheap nowadays. If you connect a non-Ubiquiti branded RTSP cam to their NVR software you lose a ton of features.

> https://frigate.video/

How many cameras do you have on your frigate instance? i’ve been running frigate for couple years and seemed to have hit a limit of 6 cameras. 3 of them are wireless and 3 are connected to Ethernet. Mainly adding any more seems to adversely impact detection. I suspect it was maybe because the coral TPU board was hitting its limits. So I recently switched to intel arc a380 for inference. I’m going to add more cameras soon to see it helps.

You were definitely hitting the limitations of the coral. Fregata (a native port of Frigate to macOS) can easily handle 25+ cameras since Apple Silicon can do detections in 1-2ms, giving you 500-1000 object detection inferences per second.

Wireless cameras can also cause their own set of issues, but I can understand using them if you have to.

That seems low for a Frigate setup with a Coral and suggests something else isn't right. Im running ~20 1080p cameras on two Corals right now. The general rule of thumb is 8-16 cameras per Coral, but it all depends on frequency Frigate is having to pass frames to the detector. Inference time per frame portion passed to the coral is about 10ms (100 detections a second), which is fast enough to cover a good number of cameras.

Worth noting most of the time the Corals sit idle in many setups, as Frigate only wakes them up if it detects motion with simpler algorithms on the CPU first. You gain capacity for a further 100 detections/sec for every Coral you add essentially. The corals are not sitting watching every single frame from every camera, which I think is a common misconception about Frigate.

It's worthwhile to spend some time with the docs - the mistake I always see made is folks passing a full fat 4k stream for detection at some silly FPS, which generally doesn't make the detection work any better and greatly increases processing costs.

If your six cameras really are generating enough events (100 a second) to saturate a coral, I'd be looking at what else I screwed up!

> https://docs.frigate.video/frigate/camera_setup/#choosing-a-...

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