Downgrade from Lightweight to Autonomous Using Linux
Hello world,
I recently came across a solution for a small problem I was working on, and I thought I would share.
I have a Cisco 1131 AG lightweight access point that I wanted to downgrade to autonomous mode. Now this is easy if you have a WLC (Wireless LAN Controller) that these APs are designed for, but if you don’t you have to perform a downgrade manually.
There are lots of instructions on the Internet, but this is the Cisco documentation for this issue.
What Cisco leaves out is what the AP is expecting out of your TFTP server. When the AP loads up into recovery mode it is going to be attempting to connect to a tftp server at the broadcast address: tftp://255.255.255.255 — essentially this means that the AP will attempt to connect to an address that every device on the LAN has.
My laptop is running Ubuntu (a flavour of Linux) and I have the tftpd-hpa package as my TFTP server. Normally I like the setup I have, but today it wasn’t enough — the AP wasn’t connecting.
The CLI was throwing this error:
image_recovery: Download default IOS tar image tftp://255.255.255.255/c1130-k9w7-tar.default
examining image…
extracting info (280 bytes)
Premature end of tar file
ERROR: Image is not a valid IOS image archive.And when I used wireshark to look at the traffic I found that the tftp server wasn’t responding to the requests from the AP. So I configured tftpd-hpa to specifically listen on the broadcast address like this:
$ cat /etc/default/tftpd-hpa
#Defaults for tftpd-hpa
RUN_DAEMON="yes"
OPTIONS="-c -l -s /var/lib/tftpboot -a 255.255.255.255"And restarted tftpd with /etc/init.d/tftpd-hpa.
Once I did that, the AP was able to connect and all was well in the world.
[...] And here is a link to the original article that you were looking for! http://wozney.ca/2008/12/18/downgrade-from-lightweight-to-autonomous-using-linux/ [...]