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Reverse-engineering the UniFi inform protocol

https://tamarack.cloud/blog/reverse-engineering-unifi-inform-protocol
67•baconomatic•3h ago

Comments

devmor•2h ago
> ("TNBU" is "UNBT" backwards, presumably UniFi Broadcast Technology.)

This seems like an odd misunderstanding, especially because the correct inversion “UBNT” is the default login name for most UniFi web UIs.

You might have a bit of dyslexia, OP!

dwood_dev•2h ago
ubnt has been the ubiquiti default login at least back to 2010 when I started using their products, before UniFi was a brand. I always assumed it was short for Ubiquiti Networks.
hrimfaxi•1h ago
Sure, but the parent was saying this part was odd:

> "TNBU" is "UNBT" backwards

TNBU is clearly NOT uNbt backwards.

idorosen•1h ago
Using the network byte ordering (big endian) of UBNT as the magic number in the protocol is a nice touch.
EvanAnderson•1h ago
I believe they used MIPS processors in their early gear, so that makes sense.
mikepurvis•41m ago
A lot of companies in that space did then. I was at a robotics company at the time and we experimented with mikrotik routerboards + the various long-range Ubiquiti wifi modules, some of which are even still listed on the website: https://techspecs.ui.com/uisp/accessory-tech/xr (though not the 900 MHz XR9, which was arguably one of the most interesting for long range comms)
baconomatic•2h ago
You might be onto something there! But yes, good catch, I'll get that updated.
voidUpdate•1h ago
Is it just me that pretty much cannot read most of the text in the "Reading the MAC" code block? I don't know if it's because I use dark mode, but some of the text is #24292E on top of #141A16, which for me at least is practically invisible
baconomatic•1h ago
Sorry about that, I typically use light mode, fixed and deployed!
voidUpdate•1h ago
A million times better, thanks =)
baconomatic•1h ago
Thanks for calling it out!
scottlamb•1h ago
Bit of a thread-jack, but has anyone reverse-engineered the UniFi camera adoption protocol? I was surprised to discover that, unlike the APs, the cameras can't be adopted through the Unifi Software Controller that you can just throw into a Docker container. You're supposed to do that through their NVR appliance (Unifi Protect). I was hoping to just use them with my open-source NVR. They seem to be about the only option for a reasonably priced, larger image sensor camera that is not made by a company participating in the Uyghur genocide (Hikvision, Dahua, Univision, Huawei).

I found https://community.home-assistant.io/t/unifi-cameras-without-... in which someone sshed in, edited some config files by hand, and got streaming to work for the current boot. One could probably take that a bit further and, you know, save the config to flash. But it'd be nice to just do it the way their controller does and know it's going to work for future firmware updates and such.

They also stream by connecting to your NVR with modified version of flv, rather than you connecting to them with RTSP, which is annoying but can be worked around.

mrweasel•1h ago
It seems like a pretty tall order, but I really want an open source access point controller daemon that knows how to provision and manage a wide variety of APs from different manufacturers.

So you'd have one services that can provision Ubiquity, MikroTik, TPLink and other APs and manage the clients.

baconomatic•1h ago
Now that would be interesting! Multi-vendor support is on the radar, but haven't started looking into it much yet.
ctippett•1h ago
Nice trick. Just a heads up that I had to whitelist your domain as NextDNS blocked it for being newly registered.

Given this thread will probably attract other Unifi users... has anyone had success migrating from MongoDB to something like FerretDB?

I played around with getting this to work a few weeks ago and found that day-to-day it works without issue, but restoring a backup will error since it relies on some unsupported Mongo semantics (renaming collections iirc).

paulddraper•1h ago
What does an admin do about NextDNS blocks?
bastawhiz•48m ago
If you subscribe to the mindset of "new domains are likely to be bad" you just deal with a steady stream of allowlist requests from your users until the end of time. There will be new domains until the end of time, and site owners shouldn't be doing anything extra (imo) to justify their existence to admins. If you use a firewall voluntarily and that firewall blocks sites that are legitimate, that's on you, not the site owner.

We get this a lot at my job, where many customers' admins block s3 buckets by default. We give our customers a list of hostnames to allowlist and if they can't figure it out, that's on them.

CptKriechstrom•1h ago
Do I miss something? How do you adopt the device in the first place? If you have to SSH into the device and set the inform URL manually could't you just route the request based on the request hostname?
baconomatic•1h ago
Yep, once you set-inform the host header handles the routing. This in particular is most useful for things like DHCP Option 43, where devices only get an IP.
CptKriechstrom•1h ago
But if you only got that IP and a MAC-Address - how do you know which tenant is supposed to adopt the device?
baconomatic•59m ago
We support two approaches, you can either pre-register MAC-Addresses or you can add source IP's to assist with that mapping. There is more information in our docs about this: https://tamarack.cloud/docs/migration
opengrass•21m ago
Controller uses way to much RAM compared to OpenWISP and good luck if a device is EOL. Lots of $10 USG-3P's out there.

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Reverse-engineering the UniFi inform protocol

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