Yesterday, I commented that an entirely foreseeable and preventable chain of events had led to me spending entirely too much time and money moving my home network over to Ubiquiti gear.

I should note at this point that I tend to use “Ubiquiti” and “UniFi” interchangeably, and I should probably watch that because there probably is a distinction, but at the same time I tend to use “gigabit” without looking up whether it really should be “gibibit” because the only people that care strongly about whether gigabit or gibibit is accurate are the same sort of people who smugly tell you that Pluto is not technically a planet

I also touched on the idea that even having a “home network” as opposed to a simple monolith leased from the cable company that handles all of your home connectivity needs is, in itself, an entirely unnecessary thing for realistically 99% of people in the modern developed world.

Nonetheless, I have one and I decided it needed to be made up largely of components from a single manufacturer that would naturally work seamlessly and in harmony to make our connected home the best possible connected home it could be.

I have never been more wrong.

To be fair to Ubiquiti, the cracks in the system didn’t become obvious until I decided that a perfectly-functional network could be …better.

Actually, if I could just buy a collar that would give me powerful electric shocks whenever I thought or said some variation of the phrase “well, it’s working now but I think I can improve it” it would save me so much time at the cost of only occasional searing pain.

To be specific.  As I mentioned previously, I’d gone from a very small UniFi setup to a rather complex one due to a combination of factors involving having access to a budget that needed to be spent and wanting to have a fallback for the incredibly rare occasions when my primary Internet connection was no longer available.

I feel I have to make that clear – as much as I will occasionally say unkind things about the state of my cable service, if I look at it rationally I need to acknowledge that Xfinity manages a very high level of uptime.

I just wanted it to be better.  (see above)

Specifically, I wanted to move the UniFi controller (the “secret sauce” that makes their gear worth the premiums) from one device to another.  I had an Express 7, which is an all-in-one router + WiFi solution and which was rather nice but suffered from its physical location in the house.  By changing the controller to a “Cloud Fiber Gateway” I could have the router near the cable modem and use the Express 7 as a wireless access point at a place in the house that gave better coverage.

There were probably other advantages.  But that was how I justified things.

In my defense, I DID research the process, and read a lot of reddit posts and even Ubiquiti’s own migration documents. They all seemed to agree that the process was as simple as backing up your existing configuration, plugging in your new controller, and restoring your backup during the initial setup.

For all I know, that’s how it works if you do it correctly.

That is not how it worked for me.

The first sign that there were going to be issues came when I tried to set up the new controller with it plugged directly into the UCI – that’s the UniFi cable modem.  The UniFi mobile app would happily detect the existence of the new controller, but would then report that it couldn’t get an internet connection.

At that point, I reconnected the Express 7 to the UCI and plugged the cloud gateway in downstream.  It got a network connection then, and even gave me the option to restore from an backup – with a list of all the Express 7 backups, even!

This failed.   My thought was that it might just need a firmware update, so I continued the process to set it up as new, got a firmware update, factory reset the configuration and tried the setup process again.  Problem was, now it wasn’t showing me the Express 7 backups.  It had made a backup of itself during the update process and that was the only backup it was going to try to restore.

I managed to download a file containing the last Express 7 backup and tried to restore from that, but the cloud gateway was very firm in saying that the backup wasn’t compatible.  There may be multiple KINDS of backups you can make?  Like, configuration only vs. configuration + applications?  I dunno.  I was not going to be able to restore this backup.

I decided to set it up as new.  I didn’t think I had that many customizations applied to the Express 7, after all.  Bring it online, set up the WiFi SSID and password, probably not much else to do.

If you’d like to bury your face in your hands at this point in sympathy, it would be appreciated.  I’ll assume you’ve done so.

So I plugged the cloud gateway back into the UCI and… no internet connection.

I fumed.  I looked things up on the web.  One site suggested I clone the MAC address from the Express 7, and this didn’t work.  Another site suggested I unplug the UCI for 10 minutes and plug it back in before trying to connect a new gateway.

Surprisingly, this last worked.  With the new cloud gateway in place, all of my devices came happily back online.  I just couldn’t manage them from the UniFi app, or even see any of them in the devices list.  As far as UniFi was considered, they were still all attached to the by-now-disconnected Express 7.

I also couldn’t adopt the switch that was connected to the cloud gateway, but fortunately a factory reset took care of that, and after that I could adopt all downstream devices.

I couldn’t, however, adopt the UCI.

I crossed my fingers and did a factory reset, praying that I wouldn’t need to call Xfinity and get the thing reactivated.

It didn’t need reactivation – but now the adoption process was failing with the error

“Console connection failed, we could not connect to your Unifi OS Console, Please try again”

I should have taken some screenshots during this whole ordeal.  If you’ve wound up on this page because you’re going through some similar nonsense and are trying to troubleshoot it, I apologize for the lack of same.  I was very focused on fixing the dang thing and not very focused on documenting it.

Anyway, the solution was to unplug the UCI, wait 10 minutes, and plug it back in.  This should not have been necessary.  I cannot explain why it WAS necessary.  But it worked.

Now I had a working network, admittedly one running on default settings which was going to cause me trouble that I hadn’t anticipated, and it was time to get the Express 7 set up as a WAP.  You know, the whole reason for the new cloud gateway.

I plugged it in, factory reset it, connected it to the switch and waited for it to reboot – and it immediately popped up in the UniFi app and asked me to configure it!

I’ll spare you the next few minutes.  The secret is to close the popup asking you to configure your Express 7 and instead go in to your UniFi devices and adopt it.  It’s trying to set it up as a new controller, NOT a WAP, and this will fail.

After that, all I needed to do was set up the WiFi SSID again.  Oh, and enable 6 Ghz radios.  And my DHCP address space was wrong.  And all of the MAC addresses that I had painstakingly looked up and given human-readable names were just MAC addresses again.  And my firewall rules preventing Android TVs from serving me advertisements had been wiped.  And my region blocking for Russia and similar countries was gone.  And all of the IP addresses I had the DHCP server hand out based on MAC addresses were lost.  And… look by this point I think you get the idea.

Honestly, I have no idea how much configuration I HAD done on the old controller.  But it turns out that it was a LOT, little of it was documented, and I didn’t realize it wasn’t part of the default options until suddenly it wasn’t working.

I can at least report that the network is up and running now.  And it IS, objectively, better than it used to be.

Gotta look into that shock collar idea now.