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Comment by creeble | Hacker News Reader

Quick q: My understanding is that the unifi controller doesn't actually control anything actively, it just serves as UI to the APs. When my controller box goes down, I don't seem to notice any service difference with my 3 APs.

Is that true?

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It doesn't need to be running unless you have guest portal.

I recently moved my internal network to containers - forgot to move the controller and didn't even notice until weeks later.

This is true. You don't need a dedicated box (at least for the simple configurations that I've run). A home user would be fine installing the controller software on their laptop and only launching it when changing config settings.

They have some hardware that runs it's management interface on the device itself. Their UniFi and USG and some of their more prosumer-ish switches and stuff require you to run the UniFi Controller, which is web-based, on a computer. Our ops guys manage our 3 UniFi APs running the UniFi Controller on their individual laptops. If they need to change configuration they fire up the UniFi Controller and hit a webpage on their localhost.

The devices, once configured, run independently of the UniFi Controller. It's just needed for configuration changes or monitoring outside of snmp. (or apparently the guest portal)

I just run the Unifi Controller on my Mac when I need to configure something and then shut it down. AFAIK some features (e.g. WiFi captive portal, if I remember correctly) require a Controller running full-time.

Yeah don't need it all the time, but it's nice to have running since you can use their mobile app to make config changes without having to boot up a laptop or make sure the app is running.

We ran the controller in enterprise setup (100s of APs) for easy adopting of new devices and monitoring.

It did add some functionality there, but for a home solution it does not need a controller at all.

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