UniFi L3 persistent inform URL

Networking & Firewalls
1

Hi! I am a newbie Unifi network admin with a few sites for friends, family, colleagues and a couple of small businesses (restaurants) on a self hosted Unifi controller I’ve had for a few years.

L3 adoption of new devices is very straight forward up until the adopted devices update and/or reboot, then they revert back to the default inform URL. This has caused me lots of troubleshooting and head banging/scratching.

Unifi support tells me to use DHCP option 43 (which is not an option for me due to different clients’ non-Ubiquiti gateways/routers). DNS resolving of “Unifi” is not an option for me at all sites, and I think the set-inform command should be persistent.

Has anyone here stumbled upon this issue and found a resolution? I really love Unifi switches and APs, but their gateways do not offer the features or flexibility I need.

This was the (disappointing) response I got from UniFi:

We do not recommend making configuration changes via secure-shell because any configuration applied via secure-shell may vanish after reboot.

If you want to adopt the device using L3-adoption, we strongly recommend using DHCP option 43. This option leverages your DHCP server to inform your UniFi device of the location of the machine running the Network Application remotely. Those with a UniFi Gateway can easily accomplish this by entering the IP address of the remote Network Application in Option 43 Application Host Address field located in the Network Settings .

For those using a third-party gateway or DHCP server, we recommend consulting your manufacturer’s documentation to learn more.

2

I have never had an issue setting it via the set-inform method for both switches and AP’s. That is how we have all of our clients set up to come back to our controller.

1 Like
3

I also never had an issue up to about 2 months ago, i always used to set the inform with ssh with the set-inform and it worked fine, about 2 months ago or so i started having issues that it falls back to unifi:8080/inform after reboot unless if i have a unifi gateway, i havent found a solution so far, dns edits doesn’t seem like a sustanable solution if im not managing the network and router

4

In the advanced setting you can set the inform host.

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5

Sorry forgot to get this part in the original post, i do have the overide set with my controller address, and like i said nothing has changed for a few years