Manually setting the controller address for a Unifi AP
In some circumstances there may be a need to manually tell a Unifi AP where to find its controller. This may be needed if you can’t provide the host name “unifi” in the DNS server for the subnet that the APs are located in.
The prerequisite to this process is you must know the IP address of the AP you need to modify. How you accomplish that I leave to you.
Steps (3 total)
SSH to your Unifi radio
ssh to ubnt:192.168.1.20 (or whatever the IP address is.)
default password is ubnt, if it something else, I hope you wrote it down when you set it. 🙂
Reset to defaults
You must reset the AP to defaults before changing the inform ip address. To do so execute the following command
syswrapper.sh restore-default
This will reboot the radio and disconnect your SSH session. Once it comes back online, you will need to reconnect.
Set new inform IP address
Connect to the mca client
mca-cli
Now issue the set-inform command with the IP address of your Unifi controller.
set-inform http://192.168.3.2:8080/inform
The AP should connect to the controller within a few seconds and you are set.
Conclusion
My need for this arose when I copied my config from my local Unifi controller to a new one on a VM in a different subnet. The problem I ran into was that DNS for the subnet where the APs were isn’t setup to use our internal DNS servers so it wasn’t seeing the “unifi” host in my DNS. Since I didn’t have direct control of the router, I had to find a solution until the router could be updated. Thanks to the Ubiquiti forum guys for providing this solution. (see Reference Link)
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About Author
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Linux Windows & Networks System Administrator with some years of professional working experiance in the IT field. This is my personal blog where I make some notes and memo's on interesting materials.