Varia Controller Unifi Unit (Firewall?)

[MrKfromG]

Hello everybody in the LTT forum, I am counting on the swarm intelligence of y'all because I am totally lost rn. 

A relative of mine bequeathed his beloved networking hardware to me. 

He told me it would be a hardware firewall but I have no idea how to set it up or how to access the configuration of this device. Unfortunately there is no chance of asking him for help. 

So: how to I use this thing? I also received a small odroid xu4s with it but it didn't come with the micro SD card. 

Any ideas? 

On the top panel of the rack device it says varia controller unifi. 

I am thankful for help! 

Please don't laugh at the lack of my networking/Linux knowledge... 

 

[brwainer]

The system is a PC Engines APU2: https://pcengines.ch/apu2.htm

More specifically it appears to be one of these: https://www.varia-store.com/en/produkt/96811-varia-controller-unit-for-ubiquiti-unifi-19-green-it-rack-solution.html but with an all-black front - likely an older unit. The specs may not match that listing exactly.

 

That unit was originally configured by Varia as a “Unifi controller” - this is not a firewall/router, this is the control software for Ubiquiti Unifi equipment. But the underlying APU2 system could be used for almost anything. If you want to set up a firewall, I recommend either OPNsense or PFSense - look up their installation instructions, but generally you’ll have to download the installer, put the installer onto a USB drive, boot the device from the USB drive, and follow the installer.

[MrKfromG]

Thanks for your reply.

Do I understand it correctly that I can install any firewall software like the two you mentioned or spohos on the rack mountable device?

How exactly does such an installation work? I mean there is no display connector, so how can I get access to the device after connecting the USB drive? 

 

[LAwLz]

1 hour ago, MrKfromG said:

Thanks for your reply.

Do I understand it correctly that I can install any firewall software like the two you mentioned or spohos on the rack mountable device?

How exactly does such an installation work? I mean there is no display connector, so how can I get access to the device after connecting the USB drive? 

See that port labeled |0|0| ?

That's most likely a serial console port. If that's the case then you need to connect to the device with a terminal emulator.

 

In other words

1) Find someone who has a cable like this one (USB to DB9):

https://www.amazon.com/Serial-Adapter-Prolific-Chipset-Windows/dp/B0753HBT12/

2) Install the necessary drivers. For example for the cable I linked above it would be some prolific usb to serial driver. Hopefully Windows finds it automatically for you.

3) Download and start a terminal emulator like PuTTY, change to a serial connection type, specify the correct COM port (you see that in device manager), and start.

4) You will now have CLI access to the board. From there you can plug in a correctly formatted SD card and then install whichever OS you want. I have no idea how to do that though. 

[MrKfromG]

Hey guys, just a quick update on how it went:

I was able to get access to the web gui via the eth0 port. I took the ipv6 address I saw in my router for the apu 2c4 and opened it in my browser. The web gui showed me the login screen of opnsense. As I didn't have any password I googled how to reset it. 

Therefore I needed to connect to the device via serial connection. I followed your steps with a serial cable that already came with it. In putty I could reset the password and then login to the web gui with the new credentials. Opnsense was strangely configured and I wasn't able to connect to the internet. So I made a reset to factory defaults and voila I had a working hardware firewall

 

Thanks a lot for your help! This was my first time on LTT forum and you guys rock!