Ok, this has been a problem for the last three months. When I lost my Unifi Dream Machine Pro controller because it was hung, I was an idiot and just did a factory reset. I tried going to the Reddit group, also sending a ticket, but it looks like the geniuses hang out on the Unifi Community page, so go there with a question.
This is actually a terrible idea because you basically have to touch every device in the place if you do not unadopt:
- Always Unadopt EVERYTHING before you do a Factory reset if you can.
- Access Points. You need to remember the ssh password you have for these devices, if you just reset without adoption, so I now put those ssh password into 1Password. This is called the Network Device Password. If you don’t do this, then you have to go to each access point and press the reset button on the back of the AP.
- Protect cameras. Confusingly, these have a different default password whic his in Unifi Protect > Settings > Advanced > Device Password. If you don’t remember this, then you have to take down each camera and when applying power, you have to hold the reset button down.
- Talk phones. You have to factory reset these, there is no password. You do this with the reset button which you hold down whil applying power.
- Door Access. You have to power it up, hit the reset button on the front. You also have to remove every door controller and on the back there is a reset button that you press and hold for 5 seconds. When this is working, the UA Access Lite will go to solid white. And, the UA Access will say on the front not initialized.
The Trick: Reset Hub, all locks and reconnect the UA-Hub
On the last one, what I found was that once you do this, that the UA Hub will not get an IP address and nothing will work. I had to unplug it and the Hub that it was in and connect it directly. Then it gets an IP address and you can manage it.
The exact condition you want is:
- The UA Access Lite is solid white. It will blink white while booting. If it is still adopted it will be solid blue.
- The UA Access has a screen and it say “Need to be initialized” or something like that. If it is still adopted it will have the name you gave it like “Main Door”
- The UA Hub will blink white while starting and go to solid white when it is ready. When it is adopted it will be solid blue. There will also be activity lights above the ports for the door controllers, confusingly these will flash blue on activity.
- Then you to to the Unifi Controller and go to the Unifi OS, it will show Access with a setup button, when you click on this, it will search for the UA-Hub.
- If it doesn’t find it go to the Network application and see if there is a UA-Hub with an IP Address. If not, unplug and try to see if it gets one. For me, having an intermediate Unifi Flex caused a problem, for some reason it wasn’t getting an address, plugging it in directly to the switch I have fixed this and I’m really not sure why.
Note that you probably want to create a separate VLAN for the door access as well for security reasons since it only talks to a Unifi Controller, you get more isolation.
