Right, I don't have a fully auto process, because scanning the bar codes is a little tedious, but for my current round of installs, I used my phone camera to get the strings of eight serial numbers and MACs from the QR codes on each box of APs, and pasted them in to a spreadsheet.
As Herman says, a little Excel messing about to transpose the row of new MACs to a column, then a column to add colons to the MAC, and then add a column with your desired AP names and AP groups, and finally a couple columns to build the following text commands to copy-paste into the Mobility Conductor CLI.
The spreadsheet also has a column for "Box Number", and before handing them to the contractors, I had student-workers go through each carton and label the individual AP boxes with the room number from the AP name, and put a name label sticker on the APs. They used the same spreadsheet list of Serials, MACs, and AP Names
For me the following two commands seemed to do it, repeated for each new AP MAC address:
whitelist-db cpsec add mac-address 54:d7:e3:xx:xx:xx
whitelist-db cpsec modify mac-address 54:d7:e3:xx:xx:xx ap-group YourGroupName ap-name YourApName
With those commands pre-loaded, when you first plug in the AP, it will reboot as usual to get your current firmware, and come up briefly in group default with it's MAC as its AP name, but then will boot again to get the proper name and group.
One note is that if you later wish to rename an AP, you need to update the name, either with a new "whitelist-db cpsec modify" command, or in the GUI at Managed Network > Configuration > Access Points > Allowlist
So, based on that, I believe you could do a bulk rename of existing APs using that same modify command, though I have not personally tried this.
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Steve Bohrer
IT Infrastructure, Emerson College
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Original Message:
Sent: May 25, 2023 11:57 AM
From: Herman Robers
Subject: Uploading Multiple APs in a controller
It depends what you want to do. If you want to move APs to a group, or set the controller discovery, just select all APs from the list and press provision in the WebUI.
If you need to change names, comments, or so, finding out the proper CLI command, and then create a list of CLI commands (Excel voodo, or I create a Linux shell script mostly), which you can then copy/paste in the CLI, works for me.
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Herman Robers
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If you have urgent issues, always contact your Aruba partner, distributor, or Aruba TAC Support. Check https://www.arubanetworks.com/support-services/contact-support/ for how to contact Aruba TAC. Any opinions expressed here are solely my own and not necessarily that of Hewlett Packard Enterprise or Aruba Networks.
In case your problem is solved, please invest the time to post a follow-up with the information on how you solved it. Others can benefit from that.
Original Message:
Sent: May 18, 2023 06:01 PM
From: skair
Subject: Uploading Multiple APs in a controller
ArubaOS 8.10.06 LSR
7240-XM Hardware Controllers
Cluster
We have always labeled AP boxes with a marker and had an excel spreadsheet with the AP names and Mac addresses for the contractor to install APs in the correct locations. I would then use the spreadsheet to help me provision the APs correctly in the Campus AP list.
I tried using the Allowlist by uploading Multiple APs into the controller using a .csv file and it works great but I am limited on what I can do with the APs after they come online. It seems I can only modify one AP at a time in the Allowlist and cannot use the Campus AP list for reprovisioning multiple APs if the APs have already been uploaded to the Allowlist.
2 questions:
- Is there a way to modify APs in the Campus AP List once APs have been uploaded to the Allowlist?
- What method do you use to deploy multiple APs (100s) at a time?