Bucket permanently stuck in "warmup" state

A user of the Sync Gateway has been unable to get it to work with Couchbase Server; he reports cryptic errors on startup at the point where the gateway tries to install its design documents into the bucket. After much back and forth we determined that
(a) In the REST response from /pools/default/buckets, the node's "couchApiBase" property is missing. This is the direct trigger of the gateway errors, since the go-couchbase package is unable to construct a URL to post the design document to.
(b) In the same response, the node's "status" property is "warmup", not "healthy". I haven't confirmed but I believe it's permanently stuck in this state, since it would explain why the couchApiBase is missing.

The original Sync Gateway bug report thread starts here:
https://github.com/couchbase/sync_gateway/issues/147#issuecomment-26363713
Here is his server's response from /pools/default/buckets:
https://gist.github.com/ltaljaard/7046053

I asked him to run cbstats, but he says it returns "Could not connect to localhost:11210: Connection refused". Presumably the bucket's memcached API isn't up and running for the same reason it's stuck in warmup...

BTW this is the second person who's had this exact same problem. The first was a few months ago, but we didn't get as far in the diagnosis. This may also be related to the problem Nico Lapomarda was having months ago that made Couchbase Server unusable for him.