We have a client with a Gen1 Cloud Key we installed awhile back.
There were some severe storms about 2 months ago that killed power in his town for about two days. So, in the Unifi portal of course his Cloud Key was listed as “disconnected.”
Power came back, but his CK did not come back online (several other clients were also offline but they came back just fine). For various reasons, we just couldn’t get to his house to reboot the thing and the client wouldn’t do it.
But one day I noticed that the CK no longer appears in our portal. My boss and I are the only ones with the password to the portal- so I texted him to ask if he removed it or something- he said he hadn’t been in the portal in weeks.
Does Ubuiquiti remove devices that have been disconnected for a long period of time? Will it magically come back into the portal if we get it rebooted?
Oh- and the client reports that his Internet connection and WiFi are fine- so the switch and AP’s are all working.
More than likely the cloud key has been corrupted. I have one that once every 6-9 months crashes & requires a factory reset with a restore from the backup file, This gen 1 cloud key is on a UPS so power is not a factor.
So I get where everyone is coming from- a corrupted cloud key would explain why the status in the portal is “disconnected.”
But what I’m saying is the entry in the portal (it’s row in the table) has disappeared. Not that it shows “disconnected.” The whole row is just gone. The only way I have ever seen that happen is by going to that row in the table and clicking on “forget.”
One of these days we’ll be able to get back onsite and investigate further. Until then, the mystery remains…
I’ve had this happen to a USG. You’ll have to visit the admin portal on the device, but when you do, toggle the “allow remote access”. When you re-enable it, it’ll ask you for your cloud credentials and it’ll reappear. I’m not sure why it disappears from the cloud – in my mind, there’s nothing that should do that unless you explicitly remove it, but that’s exactly what happened to me.
It’s a quick fix, but it does require you to access the cloud key’s network directly.
Sometimes the “disconnected” USG will stay in the portal for a long time. Other times, depending on certain “Unifi upgrades”…a major version release may “drop” disconnected Unifi controllers with old versions.
The early Cloud Keys had slow read/write storage on them, and the Mongo database Unifi controller uses is sensitive to things that can compromise it’s integrity. Such as…loss of power to it storage. Worsed by the slow storage of the first versions of Cloud Keys.
Since then, newer versions of Cloud Keys have come out. The same white ones…but with a power button on the side. And then the Gen2 ones…that have built in battery cache to gracefully shut them down in case of power loss.
Several ways to repair a cloud key.
Gentle way first,that can work remotely…you can putty in, and run a --repair command against the mongo database. “Usually” works if a corrupted database is the problem.
Another way, if you can get onsite, IF you have the backup storage in the cloud key and it has valid recent backups, you can hard reset the cloud key, log into the cloud key locally, and then restore the Unifi controller from backup.
We’ve mostly stopped using Cloud Keys, most of our clients are over on Hostifi now…probably just have 45 or so networks remaining on cloud keys.
For what it’s worth- the “disconnected” Cloud Key came back into the portal. This turned out to be a problem with the Unifi Portal web site itself. The controller is still off-line (we can’t get to the site).