UniFi Network 10.6.97 landed as a release candidate on August 20 [1]. Much of it is aimed at large-scale management and reliability, but plenty of it is useful in a closet with one switch, too.
The headline features
- Drift Inspector for Blueprints in Site Manager shows when a site's local configuration has drifted from its template and helps you resolve it [1].
- Topology Spotlight highlights and filters selected devices in big topologies [1].
- SafeOps Test & Confirm now covers VPN and Management networks [1]. That's the feature that saves you when a change would have locked you out.
- Nightly Channel AI Optimization with configurable radio selection [1].
- Time Machine for Radios shows radio usage, configuration changes and events from the past 24 hours, and Port Manager Time Machine now covers all ports [1].
The small changes I'd actually notice
- DHCP Guarding is now on by default for new networks [1]. Good. Rogue DHCP servers (usually a consumer router someone plugged in backwards) are a classic small-office outage.
- A confirmation prompt before updating all devices, and an update screen showing how many connected devices might be interrupted [1]. Someone at Ubiquiti has clearly clicked "update all" at 2 p.m. on a weekday.
- You can disable insecure OpenVPN compression, and there's validation stopping an OpenVPN server and site-to-site VPN from sharing a UDP port [1].
- Easier device revert for all devices of the same model and version [1]. Rollback being easy is a feature you only appreciate once.
Who it's for
If you manage multiple sites, Drift Inspector is the big win. Configuration drift is how "identical" branch offices end up behaving differently, and seeing it beats discovering it.
If you run a homelab, Time Machine for Radios is the fun one. "Why was the Wi-Fi bad last night?" finally has a place to look.
Gotchas from the release thread
The community thread is worth reading before you upgrade, because that's where the edge cases show up. Several users reported questions about Channel AI behavior on single-AP setups, and one reported Intrusion Prevention dropping camera traffic across a site-to-site VPN until they suppressed the signature that was tripping [1]. Those are user reports, not confirmed bugs, but they're exactly the kind of thing to test.
How I'd roll it out
- Take a backup and download it somewhere that isn't the console.
- Upgrade on a quiet evening, not before a meeting.
- Check VPNs, cameras and anything behind IPS first. That's where surprises live.
- Leave Channel AI on manual for a day and compare before letting it run nightly.
- If you run many sites, upgrade one, wait a week, then do the rest.
Should you upgrade?
Home users: yes, after the release candidate matures into a general release, unless you need something specific now. Multi-site admins: yes for the drift tooling, staged as above.
Bottom line
Network 10.6 is less about shiny features and more about seeing what changed and undoing it safely. That's the most underrated feature in networking. Take the backup first, and enjoy finally knowing why the Wi-Fi was weird on Tuesday.