Controllerless Networks

I'm an Aruba noob. I have five IAP-325-US and they were recently updated from v6.5.4.6 to v8.3.0.0 via the GUI.

I just bought a new IAP-325-US and want to add it to this network because I get many "retries in" on various clients and the majority of our users are connecting to only 2 of the 5 AP's. I was hoping this new AP placed strategically could help offset contention.

However, it's running v6.4.4.4 and will not upgrade it's firmware beyond that. Why is that a problem?  Because when I give it an IP in the same VLAN and boot it up, it complains that there is a version mismatch and will not join the existing cluster. Then it says "cli module is running in a degraded state" and I can't seem to do anything at that point. It seems to reboot itself after 10 minutes.

How should I attack this? I want to join this v6.4 AP to a v8.3 cluster of IAP-325's.

I forgot to add that the AP shows an update available and then errrors.

I'm truncating the error log file, here it is:

Executing '/aruba/bin/download_image_swarm http://d2vxf1j0rhr3p0.cloudfront.net/fwfiles/ArubaInstant_Hercules_8.3.0.0_64659 --no-proxy X-Ap-Info:CNBWHN702N,b4:5d:50:c5:86:70,AP-325'
fetching ('/usr/sbin/wget -T 120 -t 3 --no-proxy --header=X-Ap-Info:CNBWHN702N,b4:5d:50:c5:86:70,AP-325 -a /tmp/download_url_log http://d2vxf1j0rhr3p0.cloudfront.net/fwfiles/ArubaInstant_Hercules_8.3.0.0_64659')
--14:53:32--  http://d2vxf1j0rhr3p0.cloudfront.net/fwfiles/ArubaInstant_Hercules_8.3.0.0_64659
           => `ArubaInstant_Hercules_8.3.0.0_64659'
Resolving d2vxf1j0rhr3p0.cloudfront.net... 13.32.246.3, 13.32.246.219, 13.32.246.153, ...
Connecting to d2vxf1j0rhr3p0.cloudfront.net|13.32.246.3|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 15,267,720 (15M) [binary/octet-stream]

14:53:35 (4.35 MB/s) - `ArubaInstant_Hercules_8.3.0.0_64659' saved [15267720/15267720]

cleaning up
done

----------Download log end------------
Download status: complete
----------Upgrade log start----------
Error: image flash failed
cleaning up
done

----------Upgrade log end------------
Upgrade status: 3

my last two posts aren't showing up.

here's the solution: downloaded the v6.5 firmware and manually installed it. Then i was able to update to v8.3 via the GUI. Now it's joined to the cluster without issue.

I had also this same problem but out of 17 IAP325's there was 6pcs of problematic access points and one of those problematic ap's decided to join virtual cluster in second try... Five pcs I had to upgrade by hands before they started to work normally.