Unfi on Drobo

I switched to Unifi a while ago for all the wireless networks I run. They offer a great selection of hardware and the software makes it easy to manage sprawling networks. The one challenge I ran into on my home network is that I switched to Drobo to handle all my LAN file hosting needs. That meant I no longer run a Linux server all the time.

You aren’t required to run a controller on the network, but it makes some things a lot easier. Especially if you want to monitor/configure things from the Unifi mobile application.

I noticed that Drobo offers a bunch of services you can run on it. After a little digging, I realized it wasn’t quite true that I wasn’t running a Linux server on my network. The trick is you need to do some cross compilation.

Enter the Docker

DroboPorts gives you a lot of tools to handle all of this. The best part is they offer up a docker image that handles all the nitty gritty details of the compilation.

Someone else build a repository for using Unifi in this environment, but they stopped updating it. The joys of Github. I forked it and as long as I run all this stuff I’ll keep updating it.

Rather than duplicating all the instructions - I try to keep the Readme up to date with how to get everything to work.

Moving Forward

Unifi released 3.4 strain a while ago, but they had some bumps when it first came out. So I’m just now getting around to updating to it.

A nice improvement in this release is a better warning about network configuration. I set static ips on all my aps. I wasn’t setting the preferred DNS on each device. This prevented the upgrade from working. I blamed the way I was hosting the controller. The new controller actually warns you about the issue and now things are working much better. (I still wish they switched the controller to use a Let’s Encrypt certificate instead of a self signed one.)

There were some issues with some versions of Unifi’s product running very (old versions of PHP . Apparently, Rasmus Lerdorf (The creator of PHP) got some equipment and built a guide to make the PHP super modern. I haven’t gone that far yet.