Surveying with a 3502 (followup post)

As a followup to my previous post on surveying with Cisco 3502 series Access Points, I've been playing around with a few options that ultimately get the job done. As you may recall, the Cisco 3502i Access Points have different radios in them than then 1142 Access Point making the 1142 an unsuitable substitute for a site survey for those customers looking for a literal real-world picture of what a 3502 deployment will look like. Because I have several customers that won't accept an 1142 substitute survey for a 3502i deployment, I've been wrestling with the best way to get this done.

  Since there was no autonomous image available, the best alternative has been to join a 3502 up to a controller, put it in H-REAP mode with a static IP address and use the same IP address as the Access Points default gateway. This prevented the AP from feeling stranded and rebooting every 15 minutes (hard to do a survey when that's happening).

  Recently a little birdie from Cisco called me (you know who you are and thanks!) and let me know that the 1262 Autonomous code has been posted to CCO and that since the 1262 and the 3502i/e share radio chipsets, there is a good chance that the Autonomous image would work across all three models. I decided to give it a go and here's what that attempt looked like:

Tools used:

1) PC with it's IP address set to 10.0.0.2/24

2) running a TFTP server

3) the following IOS images from CCO: ap3g1-k9w7-tar.124-25d.JA.tar (6.5M) and ap3g1-rcvk9w8-tar.124-23c.JA.tar (2.3M)

4) A 3502 Access Point with a local power supply attached to the PC and a console connection to the AP to watch the fun!

To convert to autonomous image:

Step 1) Duplicate your ap3g1-k9w7-tar.124-25d.JA.tar image (the larger of the two) and rename it to ap3g1-k9w7-tar.default. Place this file in the root of your TFTP server.

Step 2) Depress the MODE button on your AP and power it up - release the MODE button when the LED on front turns red.

Step 3) Watch the image download

It should look something like:

button is pressed, wait for button to be released...

button pressed for 22 seconds

process_config_recovery: set IP address and config to default 10.0.0.1

process_config_recovery: image recovery

image_recovery: Download default IOS tar image tftp://255.255.255.255/ap3g1-k9w7-tar.default

Unable to create temp dir "flash:/update"

examining image...

extracting info (283 bytes)

Image info:

    Version Suffix: k9w7-.124-25d.JA

    Image Name: ap3g1-k9w7-mx.124-25d.JA

    Version Directory: ap3g1-k9w7-mx.124-25d.JA

    Ios Image Size: 5673472

    Total Image Size: 6502912

    Image Feature: WIRELESS LAN

    Image Family: AP3G1

    Wireless Switch Management Version: 7.0.94.21

Extracting files...

ap3g1-k9w7-mx.124-25d.JA/ (directory) 0 (bytes)

ap3g1-k9w7-mx.124-25d.JA/html/ (directory) 0 (bytes)

Once the image completes downloading, your AP should reboot. At that point, you should have a fully functional 3502i/e Access Point (less Spectrum Expert functionality of course) running autonomous code that you can then use to survey with!

Once you're done with your site survey, if you no longer need your survey AP to be running autonomous code and want to put it back to lightweight mode, you can do the following:

To convert to lightweight image:

Step 1) Duplicate your ap3g1-rcvk9w8-tar.124-23c.JA.tar image (the smaller of the two) and rename it to ap3g1-k9w7-tar.default. Place this file in the root of your TFTP server.

Step 2) Depress the MODE button on your AP and power it up - release the MODE button when the LED on front turns red.

Step 3) Watch the image download

It should look something like:

Waiting for PHY auto negotiation to complete... done

Ethernet speed is 1000 Mb - FULL duplex

button is pressed, wait for button to be released...

button pressed for 21 seconds

process_config_recovery: set IP address and config to default 10.0.0.1

process_config_recovery: image recovery

image_recovery: Download default IOS tar image tftp://255.255.255.255/ap3g1-k9w7-tar.default

Unable to create temp dir "flash:/update"

examining image...

extracting info (274 bytes)

Image info:

    Version Suffix: rcvk9w8-

    Image Name: ap3g1-rcvk9w8-mx

    Version Directory: ap3g1-rcvk9w8-mx

    Ios Image Size: 2284032

    Total Image Size: 2284032

    Image Feature: WIRELESS LAN|LWAPP|RECOVERY

    Image Family: AP3G1

    Wireless Switch Management Version: 7.0.94.21

Extracting files...

ap3g1-rcvk9w8-mx/ (directory) 0 (bytes)

extracting ap3g1-rcvk9w8-mx/ap3g1-rcvk9w8-mx (2281426 bytes).....................................

Once that completes, your AP should be 'back to normal'. If you find any residual config on the AP, once it joins back up to your controller, you may want to do a 'Clear All Config' from the AP page.

Some things to note are:

1) Most Windows installations will hide your file extensions by default. Don't forget to remove the .tar extension from your file names when you're moving them around else your TFTP server may throw a 'file not found' error.

2) Watch your console connection. I've seen it ask for the filename of ap3g1-k9w7-tar.default as well as c3500-k9w7-tar.default.  Just watch for the image name that it's looking for and rename your image accordingly.