The FOMO got to me recently, and I decided to finally buy some basic prosumer networking hardware from Ubiquiti. It’s been 2 days since it was set up, and it definitely feels pretty cool. But during the setup of the Cloud Gateway, there was an annoying bug: every time I went through the setup steps and they completed, it would reset to the original stage and I would have to start setup again.

I connected the cloud gateway to the ONT with an Ethernet cable and the cloud gateway was able to get online. (It even ran a speed test!) After that I tried to use the UniFi iOS app to set up the device. In the app it said “new device found”, and then I went through the setup steps (including 15 minutes of firmware downloading) but when the setup completed, it just showed me it found a new device again and started all over! I had done this 3 times with an Ethernet cable plugged in and twice again in offline setup mode. I also tried pressing the reset button and starting over. None of these worked. I googled, I asked ChatGPT, no luck.

So then I spoke to their support agent, who asked me a few questions and then suggested I try setting up the device using a laptop by connecting it to the Cloud Gateway with an Ethernet cable. MacBooks these days don’t have Ethernet ports, but luckily I had an adapter at hand. Plugged it in, opened 192.168.1.1 and saw similar setup steps, but this time they worked! Annoying that the UniFi app doesn’t work, but there we go. TIL: Set up your Unifi Cloud Gateway with a laptop and Ethernet cable if stuck in a setup loop.

(This is a tiny TIL post, partly inspired by https://til.simonwillison.net and partly because “How to turn off the beep/bell sound in zsh” is still my most popular blog post ever!)