[joecot]

Question, since a number of folks have chimed in about using various cloud hosted controllers: how do you initially setup the network (given that you presumably need the router to have internet access to connect to the cloud controller), and how do you handle it if there's an internet connectivity problem? My office currently has an internal network VM that runs the controller, and we might move to a Cloud Key, but I'm curious how folks handle having a cloud controller for their Unifi router when their Unifi router might lose internet. Or are most folks using the controllers to manage Ubiquiti wifi hotspots without using the USG as their main router?

We're a small shop of around 20 desktops or so, 2 switches, and 1 router, with a couple external static IPs. I can see the benefit for trying to orchestrate multiple sites using a cloud controller, but I'd be worried about doing it for a single site given internet issues, unless there's something I'm missing.

[reillychase]

Hi Joe! At https://hostifi.net we have tons of people using the USGs and connecting them to the cloud server. The USG actually is the only UniFi device that has a web gui and it has configuration options for setting up the WAN before you adopt it specifically to solve that problem - how to get internet up so you can adopt to a cloud server.

If you have a couple static IPs at one site though, keep in mind that the USG can only do one static IP (without having to dive into CLI), so for any more advanced network like that most people are using a different router vendor but sticking with the UAPs and UniFi switches for the rest of the network.

We also have lots of people using both the built-in hotspot portal pages as well as external portals just fine.

As others have mentioned, if the controller goes down, the networks do not go down. All of the device settings are stored locally and don't depend on the controller, the only exception being that the hotspot pages do require the controller to be online in order to work.

[joecot]

> If you have a couple static IPs at one site though, keep in mind that the USG can only do one static IP (without having to dive into CLI)

It is doable though. I have a JSON file of the extra configuration needed to setup the additional WAN IPs and the needed port forwarding. Someone even made a codepen tool to make that configuration[1]. Is that custom configuration not possible with hostifi?

> As others have mentioned, if the controller goes down, the networks do not go down. All of the device settings are stored locally and don't depend on the controller, the only exception being that the hotspot pages do require the controller to be online in order to work.

So while I'm aware the network does not require the controller to be online in order for the devices to work, the problem is that, if there's an internet problem, one of the first places I look to see what the issue is is ... the controller. So with an external controller, if there isn't some extra step I'm missing to deal with internet outages, I'm essentially stuck if I'm trying to figure out what the problem is and change the configuration.

1. https://community.ui.com/questions/Tool-Map-Multiple-WAN-IP-...

[reillychase]

> config.gateway.json Yes you can do it in the json file, and that works on https://hostifi.net

> Internet down There's not really anything you would need to change on the controller to fix a WAN issue that you couldn't fix by changing the WAN settings on the USG's web interface... Never had a problem so far with it anyway, with 25,000+ UniFi devices that people have connected to HostiFi. Also, one benefit of a WAN down situation with the cloud controller is you get a notification email about it. On a local controller you won't get a WAN down notification email because... well, it can't send it.

[v0tary]

Devices keep running even if the controller goes down. Just no Config updates during outage unless you connect directly to device and change there.