Author Archives: Daz

Unifi Video Controller NVR for UNRAID

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If you run UNRAID at home and you have a UniFi Camera system then check out my latest container….

https://hub.docker.com/r/superd/unifi-nvr/

A dockerised UniFi NVR

Ubiquiti UniFi-Video-Controller (NVR) — Docker Container

Ubuntu 16.04, UniFi-Video-Controller 3.8.3

Setup / Quick Start

docker run \
--net=host \
-v /var/lib/unifi-video/:<YOUR DATA DIR> \
-v /var/log/unifi-video/:<YOUR LOG DIR> \
superd/unifi-nvr

Troubleshooting

UNRAID – If you have issue with MongoDB continually restarting please check your data mapping. I have seen issues where user shares do not work correctly. Please try mapping direct to a single disk or to cache drive to ensure smooth operation.

i.e. instead of /mnt/user/usershare/nvr/data  use  /mnt/disk1/usershare/nvr/data

Update 4/02/2020 ;

I would recommend using this docker image – https://hub.docker.com/r/pducharme/unifi-video-controller/ 

I have found that i no longer require a direct disk mapping as stated above, the built in DB seems to work fine on user shares. Unraid 6.8.2 

New Commandline as per follows; 

docker create --name='unifi-video-controller' 
--net='host' 
-e TZ="Pacific/Auckland" 
-e HOST_OS="Unraid" 
-e 'PUID'='99' 
-e 'PGID'='100' 
-v '/mnt/user/appdata-unifi/unifi-video/':'/var/lib/unifi-video':'rw' 
-v '/mnt/user/appdata-unifi/unifi-video/videos/':'/usr/lib/unifi-video/data/videos':'rw' 
'pducharme/unifi-video-controller'

I use ‘host’ network mappings just as there are a ton of ports and i’m lazy – use bridge ports if you want to reduce footprint. 

my first few docker containers

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This is my first dabbling in creating my OWN git hub (for the code) and docker hub (for the orchestration / build)

https://hub.docker.com/u/superd/

I have created a container for Unifi-Video NVR and storj. Yet to update documentation on Storj container.

I’m currently working on building containers for a news indexer, either newsnab or nzedb. There is another docker project called pynab which was an interesting idea, but seems to have gone stale over time. It used to be almost hands free indexer that ran reasonably efficiently. I’m hoping to re-create something similar soon.

https://github.com/Murodese/pynab

netdata – live server metrics

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If your looking for a really good opensource realtime resource monitoring tool check out netdata.io

Very light, looks great and is super fast. I have it running as a docker instance on my unraid server (which runs this website, and a couple of other docker instances).

If you want to show extra info about containers / docker running on your host add the following host mappings;

container <- host

/var/run/docker.sock  <–  /var/run/docker.sock
/host/proc  <–  /proc
/host/sys  <–  sys

Lots of metrics, check out the website here – https://github.com/firehol/netdata

Docker – Running Ubiquiti NVR and Plex

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downloadBye bye virtual machines and their inherent OS bloat. Docker and containerization is here…

The trick to containerization is picking the right workload (as with most things). Think about data, its state and where it lives and whether there are any benefits to running as a container.

Both Ubiquiti’s NVR and Plex’s media server software run’s some base application, this app within its own container then maps to data (which can exist outside the instance) that is consistent.

The fun continues when you can update a container (updating the running application), but keeping the data intact at another location. This can really help with version control etc where you can sometimes just point the new container at the data and turn off the old instance. Rollback? easy. Turn off new container and roll back to old.

Of course things are easier if you are running applications that do not change the data.  Both NVR and Plex only index and capture new data (in consistant format), which makes moving between application versions much easier.

The nature of containerization means that the full power of the host is taken into regard. This is different to regular visualization where each guest is limited to the virtual hardware it is assigned. There are of course challenges where resource is congested, but this can also happen in the latter (cpu scheduling, under / over allocation of resources).

Availability also has to be built with containers in mind, with load balances and instances across multiple hosts.

Update : this site has now now been migrated from a VM to 2 x docker containers…. One for MySQL Backend and one for WordPress FrontEnd. Containers can be linked – so the WordPress container can access MySQL container via its own local port. Very cool.