Raspberry Pi – Unifi Cloud Controller

I have had a single Unifi access point at home for a while now and I can honestly say. I love Unifi as a solution. I see myself upgrading my rather slow AP-AC to an AP-NANO or something similar. Even replacing my WatchGuard firewall with a Unifi security gateway.

Since I got my AP-AC (second hand). I have used the Unifi controller as a plugin on my FreeNAS box (nicknamed ‘ORIAN’). But as I don’t run my FreeNAS server all the time in an effort to conserve energy. My controller spends more time offline than it does online. This is not a massive problem, but differently something I would like to address if I plan to upgrade to more Unifi gear in the future.

So today I am migrating my existing virtualized Unifi Cloud controller, to a Raspberry Pi. Mainly as I have lodes of these hanging around.

Taking a backup of my existing controller

The first thing I did is take a backup of my existing controller to do this, I logged into my FreeNAS and accessed it via the plugins page. Once in here I logged into my Unifi controller and navigated to Settings > Maintenance > Backup. As documented in this support post.

Once I had my backup file, I shutdown and disabled the existing controller plugin in FreeNAS.

Setting up the Pi

To start with, I imaged the Pi with Raspberry Pi OS. I am using a Raspberry Pi 3. I am only using a 8GB SD card, as I do not need that much storage, but it is a class 10, so that it has the speed.

Once the Pi was setup, I went though the existing steps to setting up any new Pi:

• Hostname change
• Enable SSH
• Apt-get upgrade & upgrade

etc.

However this time, I did not set a static IP. Instead I defined a reservation in my firewall. I think I am going todo this moving forward as this way the same physical device will always retain the same IP.

After this I updated the DNS record in my DNS server (bind9 running on another Pi).

Installing Unifi Controller

Todo this, I am following this guide but I will summaries the install below.

Make sure we are all up to date:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade -y && sudo apt-get autoremove && sudo apt-get autoclean

Install haveged:

sudo apt-get install haveged -y

Install Java:

sudo apt-get install openjdk-8-jre-headless -y

Add the Unifi repository:

echo 'deb http://www.ui.com/downloads/unifi/debian stable ubiquiti' | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/100-ubnt-unifi.list

Add GDP Key:

sudo wget -O /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/unifi-repo.gpg https://dl.ubnt.com/unifi/unifi-repo.gpg

Install Unifi Controller:

sudo apt-get update; sudo apt-get install unifi -y

Cleanup Mongo DB

sudo systemctl stop mongodb
sudo systemctl disable mongodb

Reboot:

sudo reboot

Restoring the backup

Once I got the controller installed and the Pi rebooted. I can now navigate to https://IPADDRESS:8443.

Hardware, Networking, Raspberry Pi, Tech, Ubiquiti

October 12, 2020