As I start to dig into each of the individual Ubiquiti components that I wrote about in my previous article, I though it would be a good idea to start with the Unifi Controller. The Unifi controller is the central management interface for all the components I am using. Ubiquiti makes a version for just about every operating system so you shouldn’t have any issues finding your flavor of choice. I use to run the MAC version when I was only using the Unifi AC access points. I would load it if I wanted to make a change or update firmware. It wasn’t until recently that I upgraded to the 5.x version of the Unifi Controller and saw the significant changes they had made to the platform. This is really what prompted me to overhaul my network and standardize on the Unifi line of networking products.
I have no moved to a dedicated Unifi Controller running in a VM on Ubuntu 16.04. As we all expect of applications these days the installation was very simple using apt-get to perform the install. Once I had my dedicated Unifi server installed I exported the data from my install my mac and imported it into the new server and bam, all was up to date and it was ready to go. I moved to the dedicated server while I still only had my (3) Wireless AC Access points. AT that point I had no Deep Packet Inspection or other features provided by the Security Gateway.