So I had a minor crisis (read: It could have been much worse) yesterday when I realized my Unify docker container was acting as if I needed to rebuild it from scratch and I couldn’t find a backup anywhere. I have plans to update my network and get serious gear in place but that’s happening tomorrow and I wasn’t prepared for this situation. I was relocating an AP to the outdoors so I would have much better signal than before and wanted to check the DB signal levels between two AP’s that are a wireless bridge. I was pretty concerned when I realized my controller was offline. Long story short, I’ve been running this container on the far side of the wireless bridge (the DHCP server is on the short side) and if I lose my connection I don’t have DHCP in which to properly populate the IP address of the AP. When I first set this up I had a wire running between the buildings and in the intervening time I had removed said wire.
The fix is that I’ll be installing a Dell XE3 SFF tower with a dual NIC to passthrough to a VM in ProxMox. I’ll then setup Unifi as a second VM or a container (Looking into the options) and I’ll get all of this connected up with a POE hub that will power the AP in the main building. That way if I need to replace/add/reset any devices they will be able to have the DHCP leases and all of that where it needs to be when doing the initial setup. This server will also host any other critical infrastructure that cannot be across the bridge if the bridge fails for any reason.
To clarify what was going on, the VM I’m using is currently mounting a Samba share with all of the docker containers information being stored outside of the VM. The issue is that it sometimes fails to mount and I don’t have anything in place for confirming the mount point so some services (unifi in this case) will load up without anything and leave things as a bit of a mess. My plan going forward is to use something different, possibly virtiofs to connect into the host and from there backup the data to the main server for safekeeping.
As a point of note, Samba shares do not translate permissions/locks on files very well so in the case of plex I had to just simply make a script that backs up the files every night on a schedule. I was having issues with the docker container working and I ended up just installing the server directly into the host OS and called it a day. It works, and all I needed to do was build an rsync script to handle it.