Disassociate Unifi-Video with the Unifi-Video Cloud

/ squeeby

On the 15th of January, 2021, Unifi turned off cloud service associated with Unifi-Video, effectively abandoning a faithful community of self-hosted Unifi CCTV users, citing that they are focusing on the Unifi-Protect products and urging all users to buy into their closed-box appliance products.

While there was arguably ample warning, alot of us haven’t disabled the cloud integration within the Unifi-video software.

As such, errors such as the below are piling up in /var/log/unifi-video/cloud.log endlessly:

1610731344.773 2021-01-15 17:22:24.773/UTC: INFO   [uv.cloud.svc] [CloudService:connThread:31] Establishing connection in Cloud-ConnThread-31
1610731344.794 2021-01-15 17:22:24.794/UTC: INFO   [uv.cloud.svc] [CloudService:wsRequestConnection] Connection to cloud requested to wss://device.svc.ubnt.com/device/ufv/v1// in Cloud-ConnThread-31
1610731345.609 2021-01-15 17:22:25.609/UTC: ERROR  [uv.cloud.svc] [CloudWsClient:onWebsocketHandshakeError] WebSocket Handshake error received. Status [503|Service Temporarily Unavailable] in CloudWsClient
1610731345.637 2021-01-15 17:22:25.637/UTC: ERROR  [uv.cloud.svc] [CloudWsClient:onWebsocketHandshakeError] Server Rate limit is now: 30000ms in CloudWsClient
1610731405.609 2021-01-15 17:23:25.609/UTC: INFO   [uv.cloud.svc] [CloudWsClient:onClose] Websocket Closed: [-1] draft org.java_websocket.drafts.Draft_17@51007fa5 refuses handshake by [local] in CloudWsClient
1610731405.609 2021-01-15 17:23:25.609/UTC: INFO   [uv.cloud.svc] [CloudService] handleCloudWsDisconnected: Disconnected from cloud with code:[-1] in CloudWsClient
1610731405.609 2021-01-15 17:23:25.609/UTC: INFO   [uv.cloud.svc] [HeartbeatController] handleWsDisconnectedEvent: stopping HB timer in ApplicationEvtBus-17
1610731405.609 2021-01-15 17:23:25.609/UTC: WARN   [uv.cloud.svc] [CloudService:wsRequestConnection] Connection request failed. Rate limit is: 30000ms in Cloud-ConnThread-31
1610731405.610 2021-01-15 17:23:25.610/UTC: INFO   [uv.cloud.svc] [CloudService:connThread:31] delay 300000ms before reconnecting in Cloud-ConnThread-31

To add insult to injury, it also seems that the ability to remove the cloud integration via the Unifi-Video UI is impossible. The button to disassociate the NVR with the Unifi Video Cloud is greyed out, presumably because the Cloud Connection Status is "NVR is offline".

Thankfully, there appears to be a way to do this via the MongoDB backend:

  • Back up your current database and configuration data.
    You can do this in a few ways, and to be cautious, follow all of them.
    • From the "Settings" page, click "Download Configuration". This will dump a zip file to your browser downloads folder.
    • From the server CLI, use mongodump to pull everything into a directory:
$ mkdir unifi-video-backup-$(date +%F) && mongodump --port 7441 -o unifi-video-backup-$(date +%F)
$ ls 
unifi-video-backup-2021-01-15
  • Log into mongo and select the av database:
$ mongo --port 7441
MongoDB shell version v3.6.3
connecting to: mongodb://127.0.0.1:7441/
MongoDB server version: 3.6.3
Server has startup warnings:
2021-01-15T17:34:28.964+0000 I CONTROL  [initandlisten]
2021-01-15T17:34:28.965+0000 I CONTROL  [initandlisten] ** WARNING: Access control is not enabled for the database.
2021-01-15T17:34:28.965+0000 I CONTROL  [initandlisten] **          Read and write access to data and configuration is unrestricted.
2021-01-15T17:34:28.965+0000 I CONTROL  [initandlisten]
> show dbs;
admin   0.000GB
av      0.190GB
config  0.000GB
local   0.000GB
> use av;
switched to db av
  • Show the current server configuration for the cloud integration:
> db.server.findOne().cloudSettings;
{
    "authData": {
      "device_id": "",
      "device_auth": ""
    },
    "ssoId": "",
    "host": "device.svc.ubnt.com"
}
  • Delete it:
> db.server.update( { }, { $unset: { "cloudSettings":  "" } } )
WriteResult({ "nMatched" : 1, "nUpserted" : 0, "nModified" : 1 })
> db.server.findOne().cloudSettings;
>
  • Come out of mongo
> exit
bye
  • And restart the unifi-video service:
$ sudo systemctl restart unifi-video

$
$ sudo journalctl -n 10 -u unifi-video
-- Logs begin at Tue 2019-12-24 21:43:35 UTC, end at Fri 2021-01-15 18:20:04 UTC. --
Jan 15 18:15:34 cctv unifi-video[1103]:  * Stopping Ubiquiti UniFi Video unifi-video
Jan 15 18:15:34 cctv unifi-video[1103]:    ...done.
Jan 15 18:15:34 cctv systemd[1]: Stopped LSB: Ubiquiti unifi-video.
Jan 15 18:15:41 cctv systemd[1]: unifi-video.service: Failed to reset devices.list: Operation not permitted
Jan 15 18:15:41 cctv systemd[1]: Starting LSB: Ubiquiti unifi-video...
Jan 15 18:15:42 cctv unifi-video[139]:  * Starting Ubiquiti UniFi Video unifi-video
Jan 15 18:15:43 cctv unifi-video[139]: (unifi-video) Hardware type:Unknown
Jan 15 18:15:43 cctv unifi-video[139]: (unifi-video) checking for system.properties and truststore files...
Jan 15 18:15:44 cctv unifi-video[139]:    ...done.
Jan 15 18:15:44 cctv systemd[1]: Started LSB: Ubiquiti unifi-video.

It may take a couple of seconds / minutes for the service to complete booting and if you’re hosting this in an LXC container like I am, you may even need to reboot the container (I’ve always had to do this, bug to do with unifi-video[7545]: mount: /var/cache/unifi-video: cannot remount tmpfs read-write, is write-protected. .. meh.)

But if all went well, your Unifi Video instance should now be disassociated with the Unifi Video Cloud and your logs won’t fill up with garbage.

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