this post was submitted on 11 Jan 2024
37 points (97.4% liked)

Selfhosted

40394 readers
473 users here now

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

Rules:

  1. Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.

  2. No spam posting.

  3. Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.

  4. Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).

  6. No trolling.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

My current setup has my DHCP + DNS on my Unifi USG. However, as I have all my apps hosted on a different server (unifi, plex, home assistant, NAS, etc.) I've ran into issues trying to get things set up.

Basically, Unifi needs to know where the unifi server is, but it's assigning the IP address to it.

Should I put DHCP+DNS onto it's own system? Should I put it on my current server? And any non-Pi recommendations for systems? (I've had the PI filesystem clobber itself too many times)

Edit: I'm starting to think that the real problem is having UNIFI on the same system as the server, as it prevents me reconfiguring any of the server routing information without also disconnecting unifi...

Edit 2: I'm going to try switching the server from a static DHCP lease to a static IP. If that's doesn't work, then I think I'll move the unifi server onto it's own system. Thanks!

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] Ecclestoned@lemmy.world 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

So this is where I'm a little confused. The USG had the option to assign a static IP (which I've done), but if you ever need to CHANGE that IP... Chaos. From what I understand the USG needs to propagate that IP to all your devices, but it uses the controller to do that. Then you also run into issues with IP leases having to time out. Same problem occurs if I ever upgrade my server and change out the MAC address. Because now the IP is assigned to the old MAC.

I'm not sure if there's any way around this. But it basically locks me in to keeping the controller (and thus my server) at a single, fixed IP, without any chance of changing it.

[–] farcaller@fstab.sh 1 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

Here's how it works: unifi devices need to communicate with the controller over tcp/8080 to maintain their provisioned state. By default, the controller adopts the device with http://controller-ip:8080/inform, which means that if you ever change the controller IP, you’ll must adopt your devices again.

There are several other ways to adopt the device, most notably using the DHCP option 43 and using DNS. Of those, setting up DNS is generally easier. You'd provision the DNS to point at your controller and then update the inform address on all your devices (including the USG).

Now, there's still a problem of keeping your controller IP and DNS address in sync. Unifi, generally, doesn’t do DNS names for its DHCP leases, and devices can’t use mDNS, so you’ll have to figure a solution for that. Or, you can just cut it short and make sure the controller has a static IP―not a static DHCP lease, but literally, a static address. It allows your controller to function autonomously from USG, as long as your devices don’t reach to it across VLANs.

[–] Ecclestoned@lemmy.world 1 points 10 months ago

make are the controller gas a static IP -- not a static DHCP lease

Ahhh that makes complete sense. I'll look into it. Thanks!