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Unifi is specific about expecting the controller address to not change. You have several options: There's the “override controller address” setting, which you can use to point the devices at a dns name, instead of an ip address. The dns can then track your controller. It doesn’t exactly solve your issue, though, as USG doesn’t assign dns names to dynamic allocations.
Another option is to give the controller a static IP allocation. This way, in case you reboot everything, USG will come up with the latest good config, then will (eventually) allocate the IP for controller, and adopt itself.
Finally, the most bulletproof option is to just have a static IP address on the controller. It's a special case, so it's reasonable to do so. Just like you can only send NetFlow to a specific address and have to keep your collector in one place, basically.
I'd advise against moving dhcp and dns off unifi unless you have a better reason to do so, because then you lose a good chunk of what unifi provides in terms of the network management. USG is surprisingly robust in that regard (unlike UDMs), and can even run a nextdns forwarding resolver locally.
So this is where I'm a little confused. The USG had the option to assign a static IP (which I've done), but if you ever need to CHANGE that IP... Chaos. From what I understand the USG needs to propagate that IP to all your devices, but it uses the controller to do that. Then you also run into issues with IP leases having to time out. Same problem occurs if I ever upgrade my server and change out the MAC address. Because now the IP is assigned to the old MAC.
I'm not sure if there's any way around this. But it basically locks me in to keeping the controller (and thus my server) at a single, fixed IP, without any chance of changing it.
Here's how it works: unifi devices need to communicate with the controller over tcp/8080 to maintain their provisioned state. By default, the controller adopts the device with
http://controller-ip:8080/inform, which means that if you ever change the controller IP, you’ll must adopt your devices again.There are several other ways to adopt the device, most notably using the DHCP option 43 and using DNS. Of those, setting up DNS is generally easier. You'd provision the DNS to point at your controller and then update the inform address on all your devices (including the USG).
Now, there's still a problem of keeping your controller IP and DNS address in sync. Unifi, generally, doesn’t do DNS names for its DHCP leases, and devices can’t use mDNS, so you’ll have to figure a solution for that. Or, you can just cut it short and make sure the controller has a static IP―not a static DHCP lease, but literally, a static address. It allows your controller to function autonomously from USG, as long as your devices don’t reach to it across VLANs.
Ahhh that makes complete sense. I'll look into it. Thanks!