Reviews

The GMKtec NucBox G9 is a compact mini PC marketed as a 4-bay NAS solution. It packs four M.2 NVMe slots into a sub-1U chassis with an Intel N150 processor and 12GB of soldered LPDDR5, making it appealing for homelab enthusiasts who want dense SSD storage in a tiny footprint. At around $210, the specs-per-dollar ratio is compelling. On paper, it looked like the perfect low-power Jellyfin host. In practice, the fan developed bearing noise and died after less than a year of lightly loaded continuous operation, and the device had already developed a well-documented reputation for thermal issues before mine failed. The plastic chassis doesn’t help with heat dissipation, and the overall build quality feels budget-appropriate—fine at this price point, but not confidence-inspiring for 24/7 server duty. Not recommended for always-on use.

Traefik is an open source reverse proxy and load balancer built for containerized environments. Its defining feature is automatic service discovery: point it at a Docker host, add labels to your containers, and Traefik provisions routes as services come up without manual configuration. I’m using it as the front door for my homelab, handling TLS termination via Let’s Encrypt and routing traffic to the appropriate backends. Getting there involved some genuine frustration. Running it is largely painless. On balance, it’s highly recommended—but go in knowing that “simple setup” undersells the actual process.

Both Umami and Plausible are open source, privacy-focused web analytics platforms that run in Docker, collect visitor metrics without cookies, and position themselves as GDPR-compliant alternatives to Google Analytics. I ran both simultaneously on my personal sites to decide which to keep long-term. My conclusion was Umami, and it wasn’t particularly close once I moved past surface aesthetics. The deciding factors were practical: API flexibility, navigational coherence, and—counterintuitively—Plausible’s own setup flow working against it. Plausible is marginally prettier in places, but it squanders that advantage with some genuinely puzzling navigation decisions.

Uptime Kuma is an open source, self-hosted monitoring tool that tracks the availability of your services and alerts you when something goes down. After a few weeks of running it via Docker Compose to monitor both my homelab services and sites running on external hosting, my overall impression is quite positive—but there are some structural concerns that may send me looking for alternatives down the road.

Setup and First Impressions

Getting Uptime Kuma running is straightforward. A single service in a Docker Compose file, a volume for persistence, and you’re at the web interface within minutes. There’s no separate database server to configure, no complex dependency chain—it uses an embedded SQLite database and handles everything through the browser.

The Ubiquiti USW Mission Critical is a rare device that combines several features you’d normally need separate hardware for: a managed 1GbE PoE switch, an integrated UPS battery backup, and two remotely controllable AC power outlets—all in a single 1U rackmount chassis. The intended use case is keeping your cameras recording and your internet connection self-healing during power outages, and it does that well. In my setup, eight cameras draw only about 23% of the 240W PoE budget, leaving substantial headroom. The AC outlets can be power-cycled remotely or automatically if internet drops—handy for rebooting a flaky modem. The main drawbacks are the unit’s unusual depth, which can cause clearance issues in shallow racks, and the lack of automated graceful-shutdown support for connected devices when the battery runs low.

The Ubiquiti USW-Pro-Max-16-PoE occupies an awkward middle ground between a central rackmount switch for an entire building and the smaller Flex switches aimed at prosumer or satellite use cases. The sixteen ports are split unevenly: four run at 2.5GbE with PoE++, while the remaining twelve are 1GbE only, which means you need to think carefully about what gets plugged in where. Two SFP+ ports provide 10GbE capability, and the fanless design is a genuine plus for closet installations. In my setup it serves as a secondary closet switch with 10GbE uplinks in both directions, but for most use cases one of the Flex 2.5GbE 8-port models will be a better fit. The niche this switch fills is real but narrow.

I bought the Ubiquiti Camera G6 PTZ to replace a failed G4 camera on a corner mount, with the plan of using patrol mode to cover a broad arc and the zoom function to pick up details from a distant, otherwise-uncovered space. It has worked well for both purposes. The camera is larger than expected—the pan-tilt mechanism adds a conspicuous cylinder that’s less discreet than a dome—and the PTZ controls take some trial and error to learn, but the image quality is good and patrol mode is easy to configure once you know the basics. Aside from a puzzling Fast Ethernet connection speed, the overall impression is positive.

The Switch Flex 2.5G PoE shares the same port layout as its non-PoE sibling—eight 2.5GbE ports with a 10GbE uplink—but this version provides PoE to connected devices instead of being powered by PoE. That distinction changes where it fits in your network. This is the switch for remote locations where you need both 2.5GbE connectivity and PoE power delivery without running back to your main switch for each device: a network closet with an access point and a few wired devices, a detached building, anywhere you want to extend both data and power distribution from a single unit. It’s physically larger than the non-PoE version and requires its own power supply—that’s the tradeoff for providing power instead of just consuming it.

The Switch Flex 2.5G is an 8-port 2.5GbE managed switch with a 10GbE uplink, powered by PoE or USB-C. It’s the bigger sibling of the Flex Mini , suited for a small workgroup or well-equipped home office where five ports isn’t quite enough. Eight 2.5GbE ports handles multiple computers, a NAS, a printer, and whatever else needs connectivity in one area, while the 10GbE uplink keeps things moving when multiple devices transfer simultaneously. Like the Flex Mini, the PoE power option means no wall wart cluttering your workspace—one cable back to your main switch handles both data and power. Just remember that any individual port is still 2.5GbE maximum; the 10GbE uplink prevents congestion but doesn’t make individual devices faster.

The Device Bridge Switch is one of those products that solves a problem you assumed was too niche for anyone to build a dedicated device for: bridging a small cluster of ethernet devices to a wireless network. It’s a managed desktop switch with a built-in wireless client—plug in your devices, and they talk to each other locally via ethernet while connecting wirelessly to the rest of your network. Adoption into the UniFi controller is the same single-click experience as any other UniFi device, and the switch ports are fully managed with per-port VLAN support, all configured seamlessly over the wireless link. If you need ethernet connectivity where you can’t run cable and you’re already in the UniFi ecosystem, this is the clean, purpose-built solution.