Cisco Aironet 1140 Installation part 2 (the juicy details)

So in part 1, i went through the procedure to get a Cisco Aironet 1140 up and running in a single access point environment. The aironet series are super flexible and have tons of configuration options that you will not find in normal off the shelf access points. However, these features come at a price, you need an expert to configure it and the base price of the entry unit is over $600.

The first thing I did when I got the unit was plug it in to an Ethernet firewall router that was running dhcp, so that it could grab a ip address lease and then I could hopefully access the web interface. However that turned out not to be the case, while the unit was grabbing a lease, it was only accepting connections on the telnet port. When I say it was accepting connections I mean that when I telnet’d to the unit it said that the root password was not set, and then it abruptly closed the connection.

At that point I had to resort to my least favorite (but most reliable) way to communicate computer to computer. Luckily, I had one of the baby-blue db-9 (serial) to rj-45 Cisco connector.And a windows PC with a serial port (I had usb to serial port for my mac, but I was not convinced that it would to the right thing through Windows VM in parralels), and of course I had to go to add/remove program to get hyperTerminal to show up.

THen I was able to get a login prompt. I had read that I needed to switch/upgrade the firmware on the unit. After going through the cisco rigmarole I was able to get them to grant me access to the correct file, and they even provided me with instructions on how to do the upgrade.

The first thing I had to do was login to the unit using the default username Cisco, and password Cisco. Then I had to elevate my privileges so that I can actually effect changes on the system. In order to run the firmware upgrade I had to jump through many hoops, the first was that I had to setup a TFTP (Trivial ftp) server. TFTP is just works over IP, and is platform independent so I was able to use TftpServer.app on my mac. The only issue I had is that it would not work over the wireless and I had to hard wire my laptop to the network.

In the next segment I will go over the ios commands to initiate the TFTP download and install the new firmware

|joeNYC|