Unifi start

I have been looking at many people's Ubiquiti installs for a bit, and while I am not in a hurry to rush headlong into it due to funds etc I figured it was about time to at least start. Part of this decision was driven by the fact I have a Wireless N extender which was like 20 dollars which has always been a bit problematic. It has served fairly well, but it is at least 6 years old now and I thought I should jump to something that supports 802.11 AC since my main Linksys router does. I went with Ubiquiti vs another extender because I would like to over time at least move my wireless to their stuff and I have been debating eventually getting a mini-pc of some sort to turn into a Pfsense router or possibly a Ubiquiti Security Gateway. My only issue with the security gateway is that in order to keep the price lower Ubiquiti seems to have used a pretty slow CPU which seems to have issues in some instances with some of the unofficial add-ons. I would like to eventually move my OpenVPN server to my firewall/gateway so that I can be more assured it is working vs port forwarding through from my FreeNAS Box, but I am not in a rush on that. I just do not want to make any decision that limits me on my router side yet. 

 So I went with a UAP-AC-LITE I figure it is a good way to test the waters and anything is an upgrade over the current extender since it supports AC and most of my devices do as well. 

 So to start I needed a place to install the Unifi Controller. Just so happens FreeNAS 11.3 has a Unifi Controller plug-in. I don't want to talk to much about my headache of going up to 11.3 RC1, basically it required me to rebuild all my jails/plugins and it took me a couple days. The good thing about it is that so far it seems more stable and faster and allowed (forced more like it) me to install a CentOS VM to act as my docker host since the existing RancherOS one would no longer boot. 

 So I deployed the Unifi Plugin gave it an IP etc. It loads up on port 8443 no problems installing the plug-in at all... now to make it more persistent for the issues I had with 11.2 jails I needed to figure out where the configs are kept and map that out somewhere else. Sysrc does not appear to have any variables for the path so a quick google search led me to see it was in /usr/local/share/java/unifi so I stopped the jail created a new mount point for the jail pointing my /mnt/Jails/apps/unifi dataset I created. 

I then used WinSCP to copy the files from /usr/local/share/java/unifi to the new /mnt/Jails/apps/unifi dataset. Taking note of the folder ownership in case I have to fix them after the move or use cp -R -a from putty to keep the ownership I then deleted the original files in the unifi directory so they could link correctly. Started the jail back up and went to the web interface and performed the setup which I won't cover here. 


So after the setup its all loaded up and ready for my access point. 

The AP came with a POE injector which was nice since my Cisco 3650G is not POE (may look into a ubiquiti swtch in the future too) Plugged it in and it appeared in the dashboard and needed an update which of course I started. 


Overall it was all so very easy told my phone to connect to the new AP and it all just worked not that I expected much else from what I have heard. 


I am not quite sure where it will live permanently yet right now just laying on my switch in the server rack but I may consider running it up into the kitchen so it is on the middle floor of the house. 



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