4 June, 2023

UniFi 7.5 Raspberry Pi Setup

TL;DR: UniFi 7.4 and 7.5 cannot run on 32-bit Raspbian. But it works fine, if you use 64-bit and a couple tricks.

Note: This post was originally written for 7.4, and has been updated for UniFi 7.5 (OpenJDK 17 instead of 11)

In the release notes of UniFi 7.4.156, you'll see the following note buried halfway down the page: "Require MongoDB 2.6 as lowest version."

If you try to install/upgrade on 32-bit Raspbian using the old MongoDB 2.4 package from Raspbian stretch, you'll get the following error in /usr/lib/unifi/logs/server.log: Got error while connecting to db: Server at localhost:27117 reports wire version 0, but this version of the driver requires at least 2 (MongoDB 2.6).

But, we can get UniFi 7.5 running with 64-bit Raspbian, with OpenJDK 11 and MongoDB 3.6.

To get MongoDB 3.6 working, we'll also need an older copy of libssl, to resolve the mongodb-org-server depends on libssl1.0.0 (>= 1.0.2~beta3) error.

Installing UniFi 7.5 on Raspbian 11 (Bullseye)

  1. (If you already have a now-broken installation) Downgrade to 7.3.38 using wget https://dl.ui.com/unifi/7.3.83/unifi_sysvinit_all.deb && sudo dpkg -i unifi_sysvinit_all.deb in order to get a backup.
  2. Download the latest 64-bit Lite version of Raspbian, and flash it to a SD card.
  3. Follow the Raspberry Pi instructions for a headless pi, with a userconf.txt file and empty ssh file.
  4. Boot the pi, and run raspi-config to set timezone, hostname, etc., and reboot
  5. Based vaguely on the UniFi install instructions, run the below:
sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y

echo 'deb [arch=amd64] https://www.ui.com/downloads/unifi/debian stable ubiquiti' | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/100-ubnt-unifi.list
sudo wget -O /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/unifi-repo.gpg https://dl.ui.com/unifi/unifi-repo.gpg

# libssl for MongoDB 3.6
wget -O /tmp/libssl1.0.0_1.0.2n-1ubuntu5.13_arm64.deb http://ports.ubuntu.com/pool/main/o/openssl1.0/libssl1.0.0_1.0.2n-1ubuntu5.13_arm64.deb
sudo dpkg -i /tmp/libssl1.0.0_1.0.2n-1ubuntu5.13_arm64.deb

# Install MongoDB 3.6
wget -O /tmp/mongodb-org-server_3.6.23_arm64.deb https://repo.mongodb.org/apt/ubuntu/dists/xenial/mongodb-org/3.6/multiverse/binary-arm64/mongodb-org-server_3.6.23_arm64.deb
sudo dpkg -i /tmp/mongodb-org-server_3.6.23_arm64.deb

# Maybe one day, when UniFi updates...
# curl -fsSL https://www.mongodb.org/static/pgp/server-4.4.asc | gpg --dearmor | sudo tee /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/mongodb-server-4.4.gpg > /dev/null
# echo 'deb [arch=amd64 signed_by=/etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/mongodb-server-4.4.gpg] https://repo.mongodb.org/apt/ubuntu focal/mongodb-org/4.4 multiverse' | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/mongodb.list

# Finally, install UniFi!
sudo apt update
sudo apt install openjdk-17-jre-headless unifi
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