Unifi USG – Setup and configuration

Last device I added to my lab is the Ubiquity Unify Security Gateway (from now on USG)

I need it because I have to work with a great number of vLAN in my demo lab.

Let’s see what I learned in the last test weeks and how I set it up to address my needs.

The hardware installation is quite easy. After unpacking the box you just need to plug-in the power supply and two ethernet cables, the first one on LAN Port and the second to WAN port.

The USG setup is composed of 5 configuration phases

  1. LAN / WAN
  2. Unifi-Controller
  3. VPN
  4. VLAN
  5. Routing

In this first article, we are going to cover the three first phases.

I – LAN /WAN Configuration

  1. On your PC set up the Ethernet IP Address as 192.168.1.x/24 and plug the LAN cable. Now ping the 192.168.1.1 address to be sure you can reach the USG. Open a Browser and  you’ll be able to configure LAN and WAN interfaces from 192.168.1.1 address.

Figure 1

My personal router works on 192.168.18.x while I choose to set up the LAN on 192.168.16.x address

After “applying the changes”, you have to re-change the IP address of your PC to a LAN address (192.168.16.99 for example) and test the USG answer to ping.

II Unify Controller

After creating an account on the Ubiquity site (https://account.ui.com/register), download and install the Unifi Controller (https://www.ui.com/download/unifi-switching-routing) on your local PC.

Let’s see the most important steps on the wizard:

Click on “Launch a Browser to manage the network” button (Figure 2)

Figure 2

Log-in to Ubiquiti account

Figure 3

Checking if the USG device is properly discovered

Figure 4

After the wizard has been completed you can start to play with the friendly user interface. Figure 5 and 6 show the USG Device status (the fourth icons on the left panel (device))

Figure 5

Figure 6

III VPN Creation

The Wizard consists in:

  1. Creating a new Network (Figure 6) selecting the options “Remote user VPN” and L2PT server. On Radius menu you must add a new profile as shown in (Figure 7)

Figure 6

Figure 7

2) Enable Radius Server as shown in figure 8

Figure 8

Now you can set on your windows/linux/mac/android device the VPN connection and test it

Before ending the article two more notes.

  1. If you see the provisioning entry on the web interface, it means USG is loading and saving the new configuration.
  2. You can have all detail about USG products at the following internet address:  https://www.ui.com/unifi-routing/usg/