With the UDM / UDM Pro I’ve been regularly expressing disappointment that Ubiquiti is transitioning to a custom Linux distro that doesn’t have a package manager and doesn’t really have any provisions for persisting anything useful across reboots — particularly configuration changes and mechanisms to launch your own scripts.

With the second-stage transition to “UniFi OS” they’ve been moving more things into containers and it has now spread from the UDM Pro to the UNVR-4, which was previously running straight Debian with no containers.

Yesterday it was pointed out to me that “UniFi OS” isn’t merely a re-branding of the “UbiOS” the UDM debuted with. The unfi-os container is a full Debian environment. A quick investigation on my UDM Pro showed that I could enter the unifi-os container, apt install software packages, and make changes which persist across reboots. It would appear that all changes within the container are persistent via an overlay for / which goes to persistent storage on the host.

This is not at all how Containers are supposed to be used, it is a gross violation of best practices… but it’s a foot in the door to using these devices in ways that Ubiquiti didn’t bless.

I’m super-disappointed that nobody seems to be exploring the unifi-os container in public. Google turns up nothing, there hasn’t been anything meaningful on /r/UniFi or ubntwiki.com. Probably all hidden on the Discord.