Ubiquiti UniFi OS controller
Introduction¶
Ubiquiti's UniFi line of wireless access points and other networking equipment is popular in small business and home lab environments. This includes the author's home lab.
Designed around Podman, the UniFi OS Server is the next generation UniFi controller software.
While technically designed for Debian and Ubuntu, you can also install Ubiquiti's UniFi OS Server on Rocky Linux.
Prerequisites¶
- A server or virtual machine with at least 15GB free disk space
- At least one Ubiquiti UniFi device on your LAN
- Knowledge of network administration
- The ability to elevate (
sudo) permissions for some commands
Installing prerequisites¶
Install the prerequisite packages:
sudo dnf install -y podman slirp4netns
Downloading UniFi OS server¶
Go to the Ubiquiti downloads page and copy the link to the UniFi OS for the CPU architecture you want.
Download the file:
wget UNIFI_OS_SERVER_DOWNLOAD_LINK
The author's file is 1856-linux-x64-5.0.6-33f4990f-6c68-4e72-9d9c-477496c22450.6-x64. Make it executable:
chmod a+x 1856-linux-x64-5.0.6-33f4990f-6c68-4e72-9d9c-477496c22450.6-x64
Installing UniFi OS server¶
Run the downloaded file:
./1856-linux-x64-5.0.6-33f4990f-6c68-4e72-9d9c-477496c22450.6-x64
You will receive a prompt to install. Select y:
You are about to install UOS Server version 5.0.6. Proceed? (y/N): y
After the installation completes, disable firewalld:
sudo systemctl disable --now firewalld
You will get a line that says:
UOS Server is running at: https://IP:11443/
Enter that in a browser.
From there, it should be self-explanatory.
Conclusion¶
Unlike Ubiquiti's previous UniFi Network controller, UniFi OS adds the ability to run on Rocky Linux versus requiring Debian-based distributions. This makes it accessible to environments which standardized on enterprise Linux and do not want a UniFi gateway. For instance, the author uses a MikroTik core router and switch alongside UniFi access points for better Wi-Fi coverage.
Author: Neel Chauhan
Contributors: Steven Spencer