[aetherspawn]

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.

[deepsun]

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.

[aetherspawn]

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!