Nico's blog

Fixing Unifi U6 Extender not adoptable

Context

I am using UniFi access points for my home Wifi. They work great, but I have a blind spot somewhere in the house, and having another AP there is not doable (I cannot have an Ethernet cable in that part of the house), so I decided to test a Wifi extender.

I went for the U6 Extender, which looked to fit the bill.

I was surprised when I received it, as I was expecting something a bit smaller:

Problem

Being a UniFi device, I figured out all I had to do was to plug it (again, there's no Ethernet cable, it's a Wifi repeater) and it would show up in the Unifi Console.

That was indeed the case: I could see it after a few seconds:

I clicked on "Click to Adopt", waited a few minutes, but the extender just stayed as "Offline".

I tried unplugging it and doing it all again, with the same symptoms: the U6 appeared again as new, as if the adoption process did not work.

Fixing it

I found a post on Reddit from someone who had the exact same issue.

It turns out that there's a specific version of the Unifi U6 firwmare (6.0.15) that is broken and fails to be adopted, so you have to reset it and manually update the firmware.

Here's the process:

• find a paper clip that fits

  • because the button is pretty deep inside the hole, the regular iPhone tool did not work,
  • i had to use some garden wire that was long enough to press the button:
  

• connect to the U6 wifi network (SSID on the back of the U6, and you need to use the last 6 characters of the SSID, along with the 6 characters also on the back of the U6)

  • the U6 has the IP address 192.168.1.20/24
  • pick an IP address in that range (e.g., 192.168.1.2/24)
• reset the U6 with the reset button for ~15 sec - wait for it to reboot
• From your laptop/desktop, download the new firmware from there (see this post) with this command:

curl https://dl.ui.com/unifi/firmware/UAP6MP/6.2.35.14043/BZ.ipq50xx_6.2.35+14043.220812.1939.bin > u6_firmware.bin

• Still from your laptop/desktop, copy (with scp) the firmware to the U6, with the below command (the rsa stuff is to force the use of RSA, which modern SSH clients refuse - that was the case for me on FreeBSD):

scp -oHostKeyAlgorithms=+ssh-rsa -oPubkeyAcceptedKeyTypes=+ssh-rsa -O u6_firmware.bin ubnt@192.168.1.20:

• ssh into the AP (password is ubnt)

ssh -oHostKeyAlgorithms=+ssh-rsa -oPubkeyAcceptedKeyTypes=+ssh-rsa ubnt@192.168.1.20

• then issue the below command to write the firmware and trigger the upgrade:

fwupdate.real -m u6_firmware.bin

• once done and the U6 is back online, go back in your Unifi console, and in "UniFi Devices", you'll see the U6 that you can then adopt - this time it will work, updating the firmware etc.

Tags: IT