I recently purchased a UniFi UAP-PRO for my home wireless. I choose it because it is commercial grade hardware with good management software for a low price (comparatively). It then occurred to me that I could take advantage of my DreamHost VPS that I barely use to host the controller software so I don’t need to bother having it on any of my local computers. The EdgeRouter Lite makes it trivial to automatically point your access points to a place in the cloud with a given IP address, so the hardest part was going to be getting the software running on my VPS.
Once I got on a newer version of DreamHost’s VPS offering (I was on something running Debian 5 before I switched to one running Ubuntu 12.04), I had a bit of a rocky start. Some instructions I found online were outdated and had me install a very old version of the controller software. I was trying to import the settings I had done on my local controller so I didn’t have to set everything up again, and that import process wasn’t going to work out with that old controller software. I’ve got it working now, so I wanted to share the steps that worked for me so hopefully nobody else has to go through the pains I did.
Step One: Get a newer version of MongoDB
We’ll want to get a newer version than what is installed by default, so simply follow the instructions from MongoDB (version 2.4).
Step Two: Follow the release instructions to install the controller
As of this writing, 4.6.6 is the latest version. In the announcement thread for that version, search for “UniFi Controller APT howto”, and follow those instructions (skipping step two since we did that in step one from this blog post).
Step Three: Load our controller and import our config
I exported my local controller’s config (Settings -> Maintenance -> Download Backup Settings) before doing this next step. When we navigate to our server’s address (over https on port 8443), we’re given the option to import a config. Once we’ve imported it, the service will restart, and then we’ll be able to point our access points to our controller. Note: we can also create a completely new config.
Step Four: Set the Controller Hostname/IP
The last step is to open the Settings pane, clicking the Controller tab and entering the hostname or IP address of our controller.