Imran's Blog
Stuff I feel like blogging about.

WTF Ubiquiti

Posted on

This is a rant.

My previous AP was the Unifi AP AC-lite. I bought it close to 10 years ago now. I set it up once and never touched it again, until I had to change my SSID.

I decided to buy the UC6+ as the price is right, I already have POE available, it should just be a straight upgrade. The setup went smoother than last time. I now have 2 access points so using the mobile app was actually viable. I put in the SSID/password and a new username/password combination for login (after dodging the create cloud account prompt). The new AP rebooted, I unplugged the old AP, everything was fine and dandy.

SIKE!

picture of the stupid AP spamming DNS requests

For some stupid ass reason (adoption?) the AP (at IP 10.0.0.3) spams for the host unifi 85 THOUSAND TIMES a day. That is almost one look up every second. For reference the blurred out entry below the AP is my main computer at a modest 3 thousand requests. At least program in some exponential back off.

According to the ubiquiti subreddit this is no big issue and it's okay for the AP make these requests. For reference the previous AP never did this. This is newer behaviour on newer firmware. To make this device shut up, a controller must pair and adopt it. As pointed out in the linked blog post at the start, I do not have a unifi controller.

The docker image for the all in one controller is no longer maintained, but it still works. I had to jump through the same hoops making it clear that I do not want a cloud account. The AP shut up after adoption, but then started trying to phone home to the mothership at trace.svc.ui.com. It continues to try and do that every 5 minutes.

The real kicker comes when you shut down the controller. The AP which is no longer able to communicate with the controller (even though it's in dumb standalone mode) will continue to spam requests to unifi (every 5 seconds) and trace.svc.ui.com (every 5 minutes).

I don't want to fight with my network hardware. I don't it to phone "home". I don't want it part of a cloud offering. I just need it to take the public connection from my ISP and make it available to my devices.

I guess this is my fault for buying ubiquiti, but they used to be so good and there is no real pro-sumer alternative. The silver lining to all this is that I can flash the AP with OpenWrt but I'll need to get a USB/UART adapter.