Controllerless Networks

49 IAP-305s, upgrading from 8.03.x to 8.05.x. I connected to the VC, had it search for a new version, which it found and then I started it installing. It said all APs would reboot, which I expected. 20 minutes later, I still can't ping the VC or any other AP in the cluster. I'm assuming the upgrade has completely failed and now I have 49 APs down. Does anyone know what the next action should be to recover from this?

I forgot to mention, a message did appear on the VC's UI that the upgrade was successful, although it looks like it was not.

Thank you

Most of these APs are 40+ feet in the air in a warehouse. So the only practical way I can force them to reboot is to turn off the PoE switches they are plugged into. 

What I thought I would try is get a new AP out of the box, get it upgraded to the latest firmware isolated from the rest, set it to preferred master, plug it in to the network where all of the other APs are located, and power cycle the switches. 

Is this likely to work?
I appreciate any advice - I have only tomorrow to fix this.

DO NOT set it to preferred master.  If you do that, all of the access points will get the "new" configuration, which will wipe the existing configuration.  Besides that, attaching  new access point to the cluster that you can reach and console into is a very good idea...

If you can, please contact Aruba/HPE Technical Support and get them to help you with this.

OK thank you very much for pointing that out. Hopefully the http://asp.arubanetworks.com site will be back up by tomorrow morning.

To close this out, somehow it all came up overnight. No idea why it took hours to apply a firmware update but at least it's up. Thanks again