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I'm battling with a piece of UniFi hardware that refuses to be adopted by a controller.

Every attempt is rejected with the unhelpful message "Adoption failed". No other indication or information is available.

How can I determine what the actual problem is?

Oliver Salzburg
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  • Well, I can see that you already answered your own question. But next time. Please provide ut with information how your network topology looks like so other can come up with the correct solution. – Orphans Feb 28 '17 at 14:34
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    @Orphans Oh, thanks for explaining Stack Exchange to me ;P – Oliver Salzburg Feb 28 '17 at 14:38
  • obviously it was needed – Orphans Feb 28 '17 at 14:41
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    @Orphans Touché. However, I was being deliberately vague to indicate that the question is more focused on general pointers, so that the user can find their root problem, rather than the solution to the actual problem I was facing at the time. Some (myself included) would argue that these generic question/answer combinations are more helpful as they are more widely applicable to problems of other users. I didn't have the time to go into details earlier. – Oliver Salzburg Feb 28 '17 at 20:45

3 Answers3

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A common issue is that the controller and the target device don't share the same network. During adoption, the controller will attempt to establish a direct connection to the device, this may fail.

Connecting to the device via SSH and checking /var/log/messages can also be very helpful.

Also, avoid using the root account for anything. Especially device authentication. It can really mess up your network, as the controller might try to create the named user on new devices. This will fail, as root already exists.
Configuring a different user name for Device Authentication in the controller settings can magically resolve weird adoption errors.

When you're deploying a USG in your network, you can end up in a situation where your controller tries to configure the site for a certain network, but your USG still provides an outdated configuration via DHCP. The result is that the USG is in a different network than the rest of your devices. This will make it impossible to adopt the USG.

In such a scenario, you will have to connect to the USG via SSH and add an additional IP address to the LAN interface you're using. This will allow the controller to communicate with your USG, adopt and deploy as configured.

The key command sequence here is:

configure
set interfaces ethernet eth0 address 192.168.1.2/24
commit
exit
Oliver Salzburg
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I had an AP that wouldn't be adopted. Nor could it be reached through SSH, even though the IP address was right and it replied to ping.

Restarting the AP miraculously solved both problems.

mivk
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1

In my case it was the antivirus software. just disabling antivirus worked for me.

Kamil
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