UniFi Dream Machine Special Edition

Ubiquiti · gateway with built-in controller, 1U · UDM-SE

what it is

An edge device for a 19-inch rack, 1U high: a gateway with a firewall, a UniFi controller for the whole network and a recorder for camera footage — all in one steel and aluminum enclosure measuring 442.4 × 285.6 × 43.7 mm, weighing 5 kg. The front panel has a 1.3-inch touchscreen.

There are eleven ports. Eight gigabit ports supply PoE (power over the cable) — the first two in the PoE+ standard up to 30 W, the remaining six in PoE up to 15.4 W. In addition there is one 2.5-gigabit port labeled by the manufacturer as WAN and two SFP+ 10 Gb/s transceiver slots, of which the upper one is also intended for the ISP uplink.

The power budget is 180 W for the whole device. The sum of the maximums of all eight ports is 152.4 W, so in this case the budget does not limit any port — in larger switches the sum of the maximums exceeds the budget several times over.

Inside there is a 128 GB SSD and a 3.5-inch hard drive bay for camera recordings. On the rear panel, next to the AC power inlet, there is a backup power input from the UniFi Power Backup module.

what we read from it

The state of each of the eleven ports separately, and for the eight powered ones also power draw.

• PoE draw per port and the total for the device. With a 180 W budget this is a useful number: it shows how much headroom is left before connecting another access point or camera.
• Negotiated speed separately from what the port is capable of. An ISP uplink plugged into the 2.5-gigabit port can run at gigabit — and then this shows up as two different numbers, not as one that blurs the difference between "slow" and "that is what we get".
• Bad frame and link-drop counters on each port.
• Which device sits in which port and what the neighbor on the other end of the cable sees.
• Port assignment to a separated network (VLAN) and the power mode on the port.
• The number of wireless stations logged in across the whole network that this gateway serves as a controller, and uptime since the last boot.
• Gateway temperature sensor readings — unlike some UniFi switches, the gateway reports them in a full sensor table.

port layout

The eight copper ports are arranged in two rows of four columns, in the right part of the panel. Numbering runs down, then right: 1, 3, 5, 7 on top and 2, 4, 6, 8 on the bottom.

The split between PoE+ and PoE is not visible in the layout — it is visible in the printing. Ports 1 and 2, i.e. the entire first column, have a lightning bolt with a plus sign next to the number; the remaining six have just the lightning bolt. Anyone planning connections counting from the left gets the stronger power only in this one column.

The 2.5-gigabit port stands alone past the block of eight, level with the bottom row. The two SFP+ transceiver slots are stacked at the right edge: the upper one is port 10, the lower one 11. Right at the edge, low down, is the reset hole.

The left part of the panel is taken up by the touchscreen, and the middle — by the hard drive bay, nearly eleven centimeters wide.

what to watch out for

• Site-to-site VPN tunnel status in the API is sometimes falsely bad. Measured in the UniFi Network 10.5 application: the status fields reported "not working" and zero traffic while the panel showed the tunnel established and traffic was passing through it. On top of that, the "working" field is a string, not a boolean. Tunnel status is settled by the panel or the gateway itself.
• The "all local networks" mode in a tunnel creates a separate connection for each network. When the other side knows only one of them, the others are rejected over and over, and the panel reports the whole tunnel as not working. An explicitly specified list of networks helps.
• Tunnel settings fetched with a read-only account do not contain the pre-shared key. A settings write built on such a reading clears the key and the tunnel stops working.
• The cause of a tunnel failure cannot be read remotely from the API — it does not expose events or the log. You have to go to the gateway itself.

what we cannot read

• Recordings or recording status — the recorder is a separate service.
• The health of the drive in the bay.
• PoE draw history over time at the level of an individual port.

transceivers tested in this device

Transceivers we checked in this device, and whether the device showed their optical diagnostics (temperature, power, alarm thresholds):

• E2O Communications ES212-LP3TA-A-F1 (1000BASE-LX; Fibre Channel 1/2G LW), firmware 5.1.33.34087: diagnostics not shown (1 units).
• Ubiquiti UDC-1 (10G SFP+ Direct Attach, passive), firmware 5.1.31.34074: diagnostics not shown (1 units).

All transceivers and switches in one place, with filters: what each device shows.

full list of parameters read via SNMP

These are objects the device itself returns over SNMP (names from MIB files). There are no values here, and no port numbers either.

117 parameters

SNMP list source: reading of 2 units (as of 2026-10-18).