We had a call from a vacation rental house owner using a UniFi Amplifi for guest access. The owner of the property had misplaced the password for the non-guest WiFi and was concerned it would need to be reset the device to gain access. Some of the devices used on the secure network are used in home automation and resetting the device would create more problems.
The Amplifi is a great solution for short term rentals because the owner can have a secure WiFi and a guest WiFi; and with the meshing for the access points the device gets great property coverage without needing to allow a physical connection to the device. The downside to Amplifi is that it needs a bridged or open connection to the Internet; and it can only be administered effectively with an IoS or Android app.
We found a nice workaround to the owner’s problem.
But it took a couple of tries to get into the device. Fortunately, we did have access to the master password for the device.
Also, the remote access from the Internet wasn’t working because they had the device behind a non-bridging firewall without a double NAT.
We started by plugging an ethernet-to-USB to a laptop and plugged into network ports on the Amplifi. On the first try using the master password we were able to access the web interface. But unfortunately, the Amplifi web interface doesn’t allow access to reset the WiFi passwords.
On the next try we moved the ethernet-to-USB dongle from laptop to a Samsung Android phone. Using the Amplifi app and the master password we were able to directly access the WiFi settings – view the WiFi password. No resets required. Very happy clients.
We couldn’t find this solution anywhere in the UniFi community pages.
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