UniFi Phantom Clients Cleanup

For some reason or other*, I keep getting phantom clients in my UniFi Controller for my home network. I believe it has to do with some way in which I’m using Docker containers to run some services (including the Controller itself). I originally wrote this project in PHP and later added a Go version as I was learning Go at the time. I’ve since converted it entirely to Go and dropped the PHP version.

Essentially, this application finds any clients registered with the UniFi Controller which have no inbound/outbound traffic, nor any customized name, and removes it from the Controller. This helped me reduce the number of clients I saw at the time, 500+, down to to something like 80.

• Repository is at github.com/rfpludwick/unifi-phantom-clients-cleanup

Root Cause

I believe the root cause of this issue to at least be partially that Apple products have the capability, enabled by default, to change to using different MAC addresses over time to limit device tracking.