UniFi : Access point show disconnected immediately after adoption

By | August 25, 2019

I ran into a weird issue trying to adopt several Ubiquiti UniFi AP Mesh Pro access points on a newly created site within the UniFi controller lately. Here is the behavior encountered :

– Newly UniFi access point deployed showed up in the controller for adoption ;
– Clicking “Adopt” did started the provisioning process ;
– At the end of the provisioning (adoption), the access point show as “Disconnected”.

Additional information :

– APs were running firmware 3.7.58.6385 ;
– All three deployed APs ran into the same issue
– No filtering rules between APs and controller is blocking traffic.

Fix attempt :

1. Login to the AP using SSH and credentials (ubnt / ubnt) ;
2. Issue the command to inform the controller that a new access point is available :

set-inform http://ip.of.controller:8080/inform

This actually started the adoption and provisioning again, but still end up failing with “Disconnected” status.

So, what was the fix?

I did both steps mentioned above, but actually did the step two (2) repeatedly using the [up arrow] + [enter] key combination until I was kicked out from the SSH session (this meant that the provisioning process rebooted the AP to complete the adoption.

I believe this could have been caused by a bug in that particular firmware version that was on the APs initially.