Replacing My ISP Router with a UniFi Cloud Gateway Max | Hacker News Reader

Replacing My ISP Router with a UniFi Cloud Gateway Max

kevquirk.com

17 pointsspeckx21 comments

You can set it up from your iPhone. And back up to their cloud service and restore from their cloud service. Those are the happy path. Example: https://www.eddgrant.com/blog/2025/09/10/migrating-unifi-clo... Or: https://www.reddit.com/r/Ubiquiti/comments/1h52ieh/best_way_...

You can do manual shenanigans but it's not recommended. And yes, more like Apple than like, say, Eero, since Apple lets you fiddle inside your Mac. You might be preferring the new Eero PoE Router and Gateway along with a few of the PoE WiFi 6 or 7 slim antennas.

Just need to find a network geek to give your present full time hobby a loving home. Make them pay cash and don't let them know where you live.

Couple items:

- You don't need a cloud key, or any other hardware to use the Unifi APs. You can SSH in or configure with an app on your phone. But you miss out on a lot of the features that make this hardware desirable. I ran a Unifi system for a long time with no controller or cloud key at all.

- I've never needed an internet connection to set up a Unifi system, in fact I typically get the local network setup and working, and configure the WAN as a last step. This provides the convenience of being able to consistently hit the router to debug issues.

- I can see the frustration of not being able to migrate the configuration from cloud key to gateway, but a migration is different from a restore, which is what a back up is intended to provide. In practice, I'd always plan to reconfigure if I'm changing hardware or software in the stack.

Unifi is indeed very Apple like (founded by ex-apple engineer I believe?) in both good and bad ways. I think their goldilocks deployment is large home / small businesses that need remote administration.

Some devices absolutely need an Internet connection to set up.

I purchased a Fibre Cloud Gateway (which is being given away), and there is exactly nothing you can do with it before you connect it to the Internet. It doesn't even let you begin setting it up.

So DHCP or go home?

No, I think it lets you set up the connection. I can't remember in detail but I had no issues setting it up on PPPoE (excluding the fact that the connection requirement is itself an issue).

I think the mistake the OP made was going to unifi.com for the setup, when in fact you can go to 192.168.1.1 and set it up fully locally from there.

The cloud management is great after setup, but not during setup because yeah you keep losing connection to it whenever you break the internet or whatever. This is greatly alleviated with their fancy 5G router they just released, which allows you to remote manage even if the internet is broken.

When I go to 192.168.1.1 it still asks for my login/password/2FA I created on unifi.com. Well, theoretically it's possible router can securely check those locally without WAN, by copying password+2FA init token + salt hashes locally, but I highly doubt it's the case.

Actually that’s exactly what it does (seems), because it works fine without internet.

I say this authoritatively because I have a ‘huge’ small business deployment of like 20 UniFi devices, and the internet breaks virtually every time I change the complex routing setup. If it were not for this, my setup would be unmanageable.

I have to flip flop between unifi.com (for when I break the wifi routing) and local (for when I break the internet), but boy is having both options handy!

IMO, networking is just hard, especially debugging -- how to observe some part when a path there is blocked by who knows what -- firewalls, incorrect routing, hardware port isolation etc.

And honestly I think ubiquity makes it easier, not harder. At the expense of complete understanding what it does. It's just the networking itself is hard.

I control three UniFi access points from ubiquiti software running on my Ubuntu server. They're powered over Ethernet from a switch and so unobtrusive - the only cord is the Ethernet cord. The management software is quite nice and I can access it from my phone or over http - no cloud necessary.

My router is an edgerouter-4 with a fiber port which is also from ubiquiti but for some reason it's not controlled by the ubiquiti controller. It has a web interface that's powerful but a bit of a mess in the sense it's managing an advanced router and there's just so much you can do you can't possibly have a nice interface for everything.

This has all been running 10+ years with very very little maintenance. It just keeps going.

It's been a while since I had to do it, but there used to be a way to transfer an AP or a switch (I've done both) from one gateway device to another. Have they removed that, or did the Cloud Key never offer it? I wouldn't have expected them to "fail over" from one controller to another, because as far as Unifi are concerned those are two completely separate stacks, even if they are identically configured.

I set up a Unifi system in Thailand that has to be downstream (DHCP) from an ISP provided router. Both Unifi and ISP device want 192.168.1.x and want to be the DHCP server and there’s no easy way to tell Unifi that “WAN” is 1 hop away.

I agree with the poster that if you are doing anything that is not a defined happy path for Unifi, it is a freaking nightmare and will likely involve rebuilding, resetting and readopting several times.

Mine was perfectly happy to automatically set up on something else when it was downstream of another router, and subsequently moving it up to be the primary router was equally painless.

YMMV, though I suspect newer software on the device might be making a difference here.

I've hit this, too, and the trick is to connect to the Unifi gateway offline, before you adopt, and change its LAN address space away from the default, and then connect it to the ISP router. I'm sure you figured that out, but I'm leaving this here in case someone else finds themselves in this bind.

I sympathize with the poster, as deploying my own stack should've been an easier migration from their EdgeRouter kit than it turned out to be - though wisely, I had budgeted a six hour window for a process that ultimately took ~2hrs.

Ubiquiti's niche really is the "I want Enterprise features but I also don't want to be my own CCIE to run this shit," and in that sense it overachieves nicely. Does it have idiosyncrasies? You betcha, and OP found this out first hand. Would I trust this for blind/hands-off remote site deployment? Hell naw, that's what Meraki is for. Would I build a data center around these? Maybe, depending on the data center's function?

Honestly, my wishlist for the product suite is a stronger focus on self-hosting, removing the Bluetooth app requirement for initial setup of hardware, improving zero touch provisioning, and letting me use Identity without having to tie it to their servers (e.g., local LDAP or SAML/SSO integration). That'd make me a happy dinosaur.

Interesting, for my part I would never build a data center (or underpin critical infrastructure) with Ubiquiti but I have a lot of it at blind remote sites and it works well enough - WAN failover, and they've built out a fair bit of downstream failover as well - shadow gateways, RPS, etc. Has replaced a lot of Meraki subscriptions.

Ooh, I'd love to hear how you've made that work because ZTD with Ubiquiti - at least in their Bluetooth app deployment era - has been a crapshoot for me.

As for data centers, I should be clear on sizing: we're talking the same sort of footprints you'd see Meraki leveraged for (<10 racks, mostly traditional storage/hypervisors/big iron stuff), not HPCs and Hyperscalers and the like. Y'know, standard VLAN-based isolation, traditional load balancers instead of network overlays, maybe the odd eBGP for public cloud connectivity with the new Ubiquiti Network update. Areas where I don't need QSFP+ to endpoints and where budget forces me to choose between hardware and headcount (an area Ubiquiti and Meraki excel in). Even then, I'd really only lean into Ubiquiti over Meraki if I'm trying to conserve capital and I'm unsure of scaling: Ubiquiti is cheaper to replace if I need to scale up than Meraki, but Meraki's support is generally far superior than Ubiquiti since it's Cisco folk.

Could I build a data center on Ubiquiti? Totally. Would I? That's highly dependent on the specific context.

Anyone else here to read about how to replace NBN modem in Australia (or whatever it's called) with a Unifi box :-)

Many people ditch the router supplied by the ISP, myself included. A few of the better providers will also fully support you (I’ve had no issues with either ABB or Leaptel, the latter has been excellent for me but YMMV). Caveat emptor if you use nbn Phone. TPG did work but was painful, I just recommend you keep the supplied router in case you need to do any troubleshooting on the link, it’s just easier. I use a UCG Fiber—it’s fantastic!

I was honestly pretty pleased with my unifi equipment. There was an issue setting up via Bluetooth / Android, but I am 99% certain that's an android thing since I had the same problem with other branded devices.

Setting up via a laptop with an Ethernet port was smooth sailing though.

This sounds mostly like a skill issue, and the notion that it's somehow a walled garden is laughable when the alternatives are Cisco/Meraki, Juniper, et al? I can plug whatever I like into my Unifi estate and expect it work with little fault.

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