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Comment by KirillPanov | Hacker News Reader

> It seemed to me Ubiquiti would never allow customers the option to install their own OS

I run plain-vanilla Debian on all my Ubiquiti boxes, six or seven of them at this point.

    debootstrap --arch=mips

Octeons are awesome. Ubiquiti hardware is the bomb. I hear their software is junk, but I wouldn't know anything about that, I always erase it right after unboxing the device.

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I'd like to hear more about your setup, because I'm tempted to try something similar. How do you actually bootstrap it? How do you configure it? Just a bunch of iptables rules? How do you configure the WiFi? What packages do you install?

It is literally just plain vanilla debian. See

   man debootstrap

for details. Debootstrap is the tool that generates a "minimum bootable rootfs". You can use any existing debian install (even a non-mips architecture) to do the debootstrap.

You will need to build your own kernel. Check the OpenWRT project for patches, although only a very very few Ubiquiti devices (USG-3 for example) need kernel patches. For other devices (EdgeRouter-4) the OpenWRT packages make things nicer, like getting the network device names to match what's printed on the front of the case.

Put the kernel and rootfs on a USB stick, plug it into the router, attach the serial console (nice easy RJ45 jack on the front!) and boot. Once it's up you can migrate stuff to the internal soldered-down emmc.

Octeons are awesome.

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