UBNT: UVC G3 Dome Things

I stumbled upon a couple boxes of undeployed G3 Dome cameras at work this past week. I forget when we actually bought them, but they have been collecting dust for a few years now. The default firmware at the time of purchase goes way back to the UniFi Video days, which presents some challenges when adopting to a UniFi Protect environment (v6.0.53 as of this post).

TLDR: Upgrade your G3 Dome to version 4.70.32 before trying to adopt it within your UniFi NVR.

Background

For those not in the know, the old G3 dome camera was marked as vintage. Pretty much, that means Ubiqiti has reached and end-of-support for these devices. From my understanding, the only updates that these will see in the future will be critical security vulnerabilities.

Adoption Issues

A number of years ago, we had some problems getting the G3 Dome online and in the system.

The first problem was power-related. The G3 Dome supported the original Ubiquiti 24v PoE specification as well as a standard PoE with a . interface only. As the standard spec for PoE has evolved to meet high current requirements, Ubiquiti has shifted their product line to the widely-adopted standards. However, they did manufacture an adapter which takes 802.3af input and converts it to the 24v legacy output.

The second problem is the migration from UniFi Video to UniFi Protect. This represents a sea change in the application architecture. Additionally, the implementation of Protect automatically handles all the firmware updates, which more or less moved the update burden away from the users (along with most of the links).

Can’t Get There From Here

When features change, and limits to testing apply, it becomes no surprise that certain upgrade scenarios are longer considered. Most incremental upgrades are seamless, and in may cases, huge jumps are not supported.

Even still, not every corner case is testable or necessarily worth the time to back fill. This does leave a couple of creative gaps which require some filling. Dealing with some of these issues requires a factory reset as some information is cached and generally done so incorrectly. I had to complete a full factory reset on one of my NVRs while I figured out the process.

That said, the best path to headache minimization is to perform the code updates on the camera first, prior to attempting to adopt them within the NVR. This was a trial and error process. I found after a couple of incremental attempts, I managed to lock up the camera device entry in my NVR. Unfortunately, I don’t know when this became a problem though the only resolution I could find was to run a full factory reset on the NVR and adopt again.

The best method to get the firmware you need is to use the “uvcfwlinks” downloader which is hosted on GitHub (and linked in the References section below). The project is up-to-date as of this article’s first publication.

Final Thoughts

The UVC-G3-Dome has been end-of-life for a bunch of years now. However, it’s still a handy device for keeping an eye on places that would normally remain hidden. It was the last device that really relied on the 24v Ubiquiti PoE standard before their hardware went all in on IEEE PoE standards. I’ll run these until the day they actually die.

Firmware Progression

4.70.32 (manual)
4.74.106 (Automatic)
4.75.62 (Automatic)

References:

Ubiquiti: https://ui.com/download/software/uvc-g3-dome
Ubiquiti: https://dl.ui.com/ds/uvc-g3-dome_ds.pdf
Ubiquit Community: https://community.ui.com/questions/G3-Dome-and-Cisco-POE-Woes/bfdfab0a-5d88-479e-879b-487d2a10b863#answer/9f2a18e5-88b6-4814-abae-3c5bf41e3ca5
GitHub: https://github.com/priiduonu/uvcfwlinks

Underwood HQ