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Unifi Controller on a Raspberry Pi

In my two previous posts i documented the use of Raspberry Pi as a VPN gateway using WireGuard and a DNS + DHCP server using Pi-Hole.

If you, like me, are using Ubiquity Unifi products, you can safely use your Raspberry Pi, to run the Unifi Controller as well. Lets get started.

Install haveged

Not really necessary, but the startup of the Unifi Controller can take a bit long on a Raspberry Pi. Since your Pi will be running 24/7 it’s not a big deal, but we can speed it up any way.

sudo apt install haveged -y

Starting with version 5.10.x the old Java version that comes with Raspbian isn’t supported anymore. So we are going to replace it with OpenJDK 8.

sudo apt purge java7*
sudo apt purge java8*
sudo apt autoremove
sudo apt install openjdk-8-jre-headless -y

Add the repository for the Unifi Controller and authenticate

Unifi Controller is not listed in the default repositories, so we need to add it first:

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

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

We now have added the software to our list of available software and have the ability to check its authenticity. So let’s download the software and install the Unifi Controller on the Raspberry Pi:

The installation may take a couple of minutes to complete. When done, we need to remove the default database that comes with MongoDB instance. This would only waste resources of our Pi, so we get rid of it:

sudo systemctl stop mongodb 
sudo systemctl disable mongodb

Split memory

Since you are probably using a headless (no monitor) Raspberry you can reduce the amount of ram used by the GPU. By default, the Pi has assigned 64MB RAM to the GPU. We can reduce that amount for RAM to 16MB, leaving more RAM available.

Open the Raspberry Pi config with the following command:

Advanced Options
A3 Memory Split
Change 64 to 16MB
Enter and Esc to close

Make sure you reboot the Pi to apply the changes.

All done, just open your Chrome or Firefox to the address of the Pi on the port 8443

https://xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx:8443/

and start adopting!!

Important

If you are using iptables to limit access to your Raspberry you need to open some ports. The ports are documented in this link

sudo iptables -A INPUT -i eth0 -p udp --dport 3478 -j ACCEPT
sudo iptables -A INPUT -i eth0 -p tcp --dport 8080 -j ACCEPT
sudo iptables -A INPUT -i eth0 -p tcp --dport 8443 -j ACCEPT
sudo iptables -A INPUT -i eth0 -p tcp --dport 8880 -j ACCEPT
sudo iptables -A INPUT -i eth0 -p tcp --dport 8843 -j ACCEPT
sudo iptables -A INPUT -i eth0 -p tcp --dport 6789 -j ACCEPT
sudo iptables -A INPUT -i eth0 -p tcp --dport 27117 -j ACCEPT
sudo iptables -A INPUT -i eth0 -p udp --dport 10001 -j ACCEPT
sudo iptables -A INPUT -i eth0 -p udp --dport 1900 -j ACCEPT
sudo iptables -A INPUT -i eth0 -p udp --match multiport --dports 5656:5699 -j ACCEPT
sudo iptables -A INPUT -i eth0 -p tcp --dport 443 -j ACCEPT
sudo iptables -A INPUT -i eth0 -p udp --dport 443 -j ACCEPT
sudo iptables -A INPUT -i eth0 -p tcp --dport 8883 -j ACCEPT
sudo netfilter-persistent save
sudo netfilter-persistent reload

All the credit for the post goes to this guy:

https://lazyadmin.nl/home-network/installing-unifi-controller-on-a-raspberry-pi-in-5-min/

 

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