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Comment by bobbob1921 | Hacker News Reader

bobbob1921

I may be misunderstanding this, but as I recall originally the only way to run unifi was to have self hosted it through an app on a Windows machine on your network, then it went to the cloud, then cloud only, and now it seems to be coming back to self hosted? Good if so. (UniFi is their app/system to configure your ubiquiti network devices and to gather stats from them, it really did change the networking industry for such a low cost product at the time)

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The self-hosted app never went away; I've been running it for the last 8 years or so, first on a MacBook Pro, then a Raspberry Pi, and now a repurposed HP T620 thin client.

They promote their cloud controller pretty strongly, followed by the Cloud Key, which is their own preinstalled self hosting setup, but the self-hosted UniFi Network server has stuck around. (It changed names a couple of times; it was the "UniFi Controller", then "UniFi Network Application", and now "UniFi Network Server".)

Lately they luckly built the console into their router products - UniFi Express, UniFi Cloud Gateways and Dream Machines all have the console builtin and act as controllers.

And my experience with the cloud key was freaking awful.

Terrible little underpowered device that frequently wouldn't come back up after losing power.

I switched to Aruba because of the cloud key and haven't looked back.

I had the same problems with the Gen 1. The Gen 2 added a battery and shutdown on powerless, and never had a single problem with it.

This is what is confusing about this announcement, is anything actually newly available or is this a rename of the existing thing I've been doing in a container for years?

This is the first time UniFi OS can be self hosted, before you were able to use UniFi Network Application (Server), however this never included features like Teleport, Identity, Cybersecure subscription and many other features that require UniFi OS.

You've always been able to fully self host their core network controller, and not just on Windows. Linux has always been the preferred platform to host it on. However, the other more specialized apps in their ecosystem like their NVR software, etc was not self hostable independent of their controller hardware.

Right now it looks like UniFi OS server doesn't do anything the prior self hosted stack does already. Presumably though they are planning to roll out some of the other parts that currently aren't in the fully self hosted stack.

> then it went to the cloud, then cloud only, and now it seems to be coming back to self hosted

It never went cloud-only. You could always self-host.

They've had different versions of cloud hosted offerings over the years. A few companies have also offered their own cloud hosted instances.

There was the little cloud key thing that they had for a while and then there's a version 2 of that.

There's also been a container version for quite a while too.

Gen 1 cloud key: https://dl.ubnt.com/qsg/UC-CK/UC-CK_EN.html

Gen 2 cloud key https://store.ui.com/us/en/products/uck-g2

Container from linuxserver.io https://github.com/linuxserver/docker-unifi-network-applicat...

The UDM pro has the controller built in. Others have mentioned the Cloud Key, of which there are two versions. The controller software runs on Linux, macOS and Windows. I used to run it in docker on Linux. For years. Quite easy to manage.

I run it on FreeBSD arm64 very successfully also.

UniFi OS Server is similar to the old self hosted solution (the controller) except it can run more of the applications. I used to self host some years ago and only the Network was available. Now the OS supports InnerSpace and Identity too.

It has always been self hosted as an option. I can’t speak to any Windows versions, but I’ve always run on Debian.

Last time I used it (some 8 months ago) there was Windows app and mobile app.

In order to configure, check what was going on I needed to run app on my Windows computer. I was looking into using docker or something like that, but I switched to another vendor.

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