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by reillychase 2452 days ago
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.

1 comments

> 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-...

> 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.