Ubiquiti Journey Part 1

Following Home and Lab Network Infrastructure, I put out a request on Twitter asking where in the UK people got their hardware from. From this, I received a list of vendors and after reviewing them, only NetXL.com had everything I wanted in stock. Thank you to them for sorting out the order. I was genuinely surprised at the response I received and the same companies kept cropping up so they will all be added to the list of bookmarks.

Anyway, I digress. This post will be all about the deployment and setup of the new network. First of all, I will contact Vodafone to get the credentials that allow me to use my own router.

Ubiquiti UniFi Network Controller

Whilst I wait for the delivery of the new hardware, I will start by provisioning the Network Controller. This is a piece of software installed on Windows, OSX or Debian Linux. I will put this on an Ubuntu VM on the ESXi estate. There wasn’t anything special about the VM, I created it with 4 vCPU and 4GB RAM. I then followed the Unifi Instructions on installing the controller via APT.

Problem number 1, the service won’t start, it can’t find Java home. Time to install it:

sudo apt install openjdk-8-jdk openjdk-8-jdk-headless
sudo apt remove openjdk-14-jre-headless

Note – I tried with a later version of Java but it still failed. I checked the init.d script and it was looking for v8 so I installed that. I also installed MongoDB using the following command:

sudo apt install mongodb

After a reboot, the service started correctly. Time to start the configuration! Access was gained using https://ipaddress:8443 and this begins the setup wizard. Create an account at https://unifi.ui.com and activate it as per the email. Then begin the simple to follow wizard.