Wireless Access

I have find this could be really useful sometimes specially when you are not using RAP APS and you using normal APS as a remote APS and you are in the remote site, and for some reason you need to purge env and configure it again

Anyways this is done with simple commands

This Technote assumme you already configured the remote AP settings on the controller site(you already whitelisted it and all that)

Lets start

The most important thing are these commands

This commands is to set the controller IP in the AP

1.  setenv master <public ip of the controller>

This command is to set from which controller he wil download the firmare if he needs to download, and also from which controller he will download the configuration

2.  setenv serverip <public ip of the controller>

To convert the AP to RAP

3.  setenv remote_ap 1

Those are the MUST commands...

To put the AP in the correct Group(This is not necesary at least in the lastest firmware he should get what group you put it on the controller on the whitelist)

4.  setenv group <ap group>

To set him a name(he should get the name you put it on the controller on the whitelist)

5.  setenv name <name of the ap>

For the IP of the AP you got 2 ways

• DHCP
• STATIC

If you selected DHCP then you got to do nothing else, go and jump to the command number 9(which is to save the config) 

If you need to set it a STATIC IP then here are the commands

To set him the ip address:

6.  setenv ipaddr <ip address>

To set him the network mask

7.  setenv netmask <netmask>

To set him the Gateway

8.  setenv gatewayip <gatewayip>

After doing all this you need to save the config with this command:

9.  saveenv

Troubleshooting

When you are in the boot when you are configuring everything and you are using DHCP for this deployment, issue the command on the boot

dhcp

 Yes as simple as that, to see if you get a DHCP address... if you not getting a dhcp ip in there, that means something is wrong with the dhcp server and you need to check that

example output

apboot> dhcp

eth0 up: 1 Gb/s full duplex

DHCP broadcast 1

DHCP IP address: 192.168.3.27

DHCP subnet mask: 255.255.255.0

DHCP def gateway: 192.168.3.254

DHCP DNS server: 200.75.200.3

DHCP DNS domain: domain.net

apboot>

If you see this message

AP rebooted Fri Dec 31 16:04:31 PST 1999; SAPD: Unable to contact switch: HELLO-TIMEOUT. Last Ctrl msg: HELLO len=1124 dest=190.142.108.251 tries=10 seq=0

Its because the AP cannot communicate with the controller and you need to check

• if the port 4500 UDP is open on the controller side and its open on the AP side as well
• Conectivity problems on the controller side or AP site through the internet.

Cheers

Carlos

This dobule post becuase i had an issue which was telling me that i was exceeding 30 000 characters when i wasnt but well at the end i was able to fix it...  had the tutorial in the original post and this reply

Cheers

Carlos

Hi Carlos

Some comments on your nice post of apboot commands.  AP group/name are redundant, the whitelist will override whatevery you put in there (we have all been bitten by this at some point !!).

Serverip is a bit trickier... If the AP is fresh out of the box or image is corrupted, then yes we need it - but the AP is going to try and TFTP it's image from serverip, which if this AP actually be connected to the Internet may result in a mixed outcome as TFTP is sketchy at best over a LAN - plus requires additional PNAT for udp/69 at the public IP device, in addition to 4500/udp, unless the controller is on the Internet).

If the AP already has an image (osinfo on recent APs will show it from apboot) then no need to configure serverip, RAP is happy to talk to master IP for all it's needs.

A final comment - this procedure works for internal antenna APs configured as cert rap, but does not work for PSK RAP which is pretty rare these days so no big deal. But, more importantly, it does not work for external antenna APs due to strict requirements about encrypting the antenna gain.

hth

regards

-jeff