Monitoring, Management & Location Tracking

This article could also be titled: "why are my (radius profiles, ssids, usernames, etc) still in the config after AMP configures my IOS APs?". 

AirWave definitely can make changes with without rebooting the APs. The important thing is to understand how IOS handles config files and how AMP works with them. 

IOS APs have two important configs: 

1. The startup-config, which is the config that IOS always uses when it's booted.
2. The running-config, which contains all of the settings that the device is currently using and changes as new settings are changed on the running device.

How does AMP configure IOS APs?

Based on your template, AMP creates a unique file for each AP and saves it on the device as the startup-config. Then, depending on whether you have the reboot option selected, AMP does one of two things:

1. Reboot selected: AMP reboots the AP, and when the AP boots up its running-config is exactly the same as the startup-config that AMP created for it.
2. Reboot NOT selected: AMP copies the startup-config to the running-config. But "copy" in IOS is more of a merge than a copy, so some things that aren't in the startup-config can be left behind in the running-config. For example if you started with a line like "username joemontana" and you replaced that in your template with "username steveyoung", it would be intuitive to think that steveyoung had completely replaced joemontana in the running-config, but that would be wrong; now there is both a "username joemontana" line and a "username steveyoung" line. 

There are two good solutions to solving the mismatches that are caused by this merge:

1. Use the reboot option. 
2. Add a "no username joemontana" line to your template. If you do this you'd probably want to consider using the <push_and_ignore> flag on that line in your template.