Taming My UniFi Network: How I Finally Got My Controller Running 24/7 (Without Buying More Hardware)

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When we moved into our current home 3.5 years ago, I never thought a plumbing disaster would lead to a full-blown home network overhaul. But thanks to a reroute of every water pipe in the house, I got a golden opportunity to run CAT6 cables everywhere—and I went all-in with a Ubiquiti network, pfSense firewall, and enough VLANs to make my future self curse my past self.

For years, I limped along running the UniFi controller on my desktop “when I needed it.” Last weekend, I finally decided to fix that—by containerizing it on my home server. Of course, nothing in networking ever goes quite as planned, so what started as a 15-minute project turned into a DNS mystery, a stubborn device, and an unexpected pfSense upgrade.

One More Time About Time

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Time Zones

I’ve written about the importance of having accurate time before, and have always said that it can be difficult to keep a proper clock. I’ve always looked at it from a technical standpoint but a couple of days ago, one of my students sent me a video
and it caused me to look at the topic of time from a completely different perspective.

Splunk .conf2017 Day 1

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Splunk

So today was day one of Splunk .conf2017.  This being my first time at .conf, I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect.  The morning started off with the keynote address by the CEO of Splunk, Doug Merritt.  A couple of interesting numbers to start with.  7,187 people were regestered to attend .conf this year from 65 countries who traveled a combined 65 million miles to get to Washington DC (enough miles to go to and from the moon over 100 times).

Keeping Time Without a Source

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Clocks

A while back I wrote about the importance of using a standardized time source.  Keeping accurate time across devices is essential so that you can easily correlate events within logs across the network. But what do you do when you’re operating on a closed network and there is no time source that you can pull from?

Where the Hell am I?

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GPS Satellite

As anyone who has spent more than an hour or two driving around the box at NTC knows, it can be pretty damn easy to get lost in the desert, especially at night under blackout conditions.  After 3.5 years there, I got pretty good at knowing my way around the box but during each rotation there was always at least one or two times where I would get turned around and have no idea where the hell I was