Convert Cisco Lightweight AP to an Autonomous AP - Complete Step by Step

okay so here's a quick video to convert access points from lightweight to autonomous mode the reason why you're probably doing this is maybe you have some small infrastructure and you don't have a wireless controller you want a DHCP server to give these guys an IP and let everyone connect to it maybe you're at home and you have some from corporate like in this case and you say hey I can still use these even if I don't have a wireless controller so the first thing you want to do is grab yourself a serial cable console cable and we're gonna walk through this and I'll show you exactly how to do it and what to do it so we've got a console cable there now you don't need the console cable however it helps because then you'll know when to release the button and of course to do additional programming and then you have an Ethernet cable now my Ethernet cable is connected to these two the power over ethernet injector right because this is being powered by this guy by this cable which is receiving power from two cords here so if you don't have a p OE and you're fortunate to have a Cisco Catalyst switch like this which has p OE perfect it'll power it up if not you're gonna need an injector so nothing fancy there's just going through so that Ethernet wires going through here we're going to use that for putty and then I got my console cable which is going to this crazy hub Thank You Microsoft for including one USB so nice so you're really only need these two this is the console cable and this is the network cable so the first thing you need to do and I've kind of pre done this already but you're going to need open up your web browser and you're going to need two pieces of software first you're going to need putty so that way you can tell that into actually serial into your switch view the updates and enter some commands so just type in putty once you're here I usually just download this version here and then I download you can do 64-bit or 32-bit stay consistent but I did the 64-bit installer and bang bang boom this is the Windows installer so if you're not sure you know how to correctly install Windows installer is simple we'll go through that the second part is you need a TFTP server people use SolarWinds I like to use this server right here it's quick it's dirty and simple and it's very limited configuration since I did the 64 bit version of putty I'll do the 64 version of the installer so download this and then you're set to go the only other thing you're going to need as far as a piece of software is the actual firmware so if we open up so let's do this let's uh start putty and let's validate whether or not this even needs the firmware because that'll be really important you know does this have the light weight on here or is this maybe already set up in autonomous mode so we can figure out that quite easily so I've started I've installed putty so I'm going to just go ahead and remove this download that way we're not confuse and then we're going to open it up and configure this puppy right here okay so we're going to hit serials if that's how we're connecting mine it's comm 3 I'll show you how to find that in a moment you can keep everything here basically consistent there's some people say you can do stop at one or two but I've noticed that if I just leave it right there it's fine and so if you want to avoid having to enter all this information a bunch of times if you go to session and you click on serials and that's how we're connecting and you can say what do you want to say this as this is where you say the settings so let's say I want to say that at Cisco settings click Save and I'm done now if I open up this guy at this moment you're gonna see that window showing up nice and clear maybe ok and since we already have the what's going on here since we already have the switch installed I just hit enter you notice it says LW tapo 6 so how do I know whether or not this has the light weight on here if I just type in show show version believe that's how it'll tell you right here whether or not you have the light weight or not now see here this is the flash version see 1240 cielos sk 9 w 8 because w 8 is the important part the 8 here tells you that this is using the lightweight version of the software and not the autonomous so this will need to be upload will need to get a new firmware uploaded on that so we're gonna hit ctrl C to quit out of all that fun stuff and we're gonna just move that to the right so we have that available alright so now we can communicate and we can see the updates from this guy right here again through this serial port so the next part would be to let's get our firmware ready so what I did was I just put a folder on the desktop called ap you can be anything I just did AP now this is the firmware right there so when I drag and drop that in the AP and I'll show you why we're doing that in a moment now what's important is once you download the firmware it has to be in the correct name convention format so we're gonna hit f2 here or maybe we'll just do this way and we're gonna remove all of this stuff and it says guitar and then we're going to say dot default de FA ult when we can when this thing starts up we're gonna hold a button and it's gonna look for anything called the dot default and that's how it's gonna know what it's gonna look for now clicking okay out of that you'll notice a couple of things you say ok I named as default but take a look at that icon get all the units icon it still thinks it's @r so if you see something like that or let's say you're you're doing this a couple times you're saying gosh it's not picking it up make sure you've actually renamed the extension dot default and not just part of the name here's what I mean if you go to view show the file name extension you'll notice oh look at that you actually named it dashed our default are so we don't want to do that we want to get rid of this guy right here so it should just be named k 9 w 7 - default and you'll notice it's gonna then give you a prompt ation you want to change the extension absolutely and now it's kind of blank it doesn't know what's open it oh that's perfect so we're gonna exit out of this guy right now we're almost done here next thing is we need to install our TFTP so we're just gonna go through this with grace and install this puppy and then I'm just gonna remove this installer pack you can keep it but it's not us at this point so I'm gonna go ahead and run this as administrator and we need to do just a little bit of configuration now in order for this guy to pick up that information from the TF TP software and grab that package it's gotta know where to go to and by default this is configured if you look on Cisco site - like 10.2 sorry 10.0 0.2 type of IP all the way to 30 so here's what we're gonna do because as of right now at Norse it's saying 127 so we're gonna exit out of this and we're gonna go to our land so let's go to control panel and we're gonna open up our network settings and then look at our network adapter I'm doing this through my perfect so this is my Ethernet adapter let me disable my wireless that would be a good thing okay and then we're gonna go to properties and then we're gonna look for IP four and now we have to change this up a little bit so it's gonna be ten dot 0 dot 0 dot - your computer can be anywhere between from da to 2.10 something like that which is fine I just I think if you follow this you'll be fine your subnet mask 255.255.255.0 [Music] let me try to bring a little closer and lastly your default gate was gonna be 10 0 dot 0 dot 1 alright so pause the screen here make sure you have this just like this leave the DNS where it's at it's not necessary so you gonna click OK you're gonna click OK and you're gonna click close now we really are almost done I promise alright last thing is let's start this piece of software up you notice it picked up 10.2.32 0 dot 0 dot 2 IP address which we wanted to and if you click it down here you can see it's saying which which network adapter were doing the surface Ethernet adapter and that's because I'm using the Microsoft Surface pro USB to network adapter it might be called something different for you so make sure you're using the right one and then what we want to do is remember we put that package that new firmware and that folder on the desktop our ap so if you click browse we're gonna scroll down into AP and click OK know when we tell this when the system starts looking for the new firmware it now this software's gonna say ok well direct it to this folder right here and then that folder has this one here make sure you only have one dot default otherwise it's not gonna know which one keep it nice clean and neat and we're set actually so the last thing that we're gonna do here and this gonna be a little tricky since I'm holding the camera ok looks like I'm gonna need to start a new video so let's do that okay so this is video 2 I just I'm gonna have to submit these videos together so just a small recap so we've got our putty starting so we can kind of see what's happening any update we have our interface with a correct adapter says serial and it's pointing to the correct folder well renamed our file so here's what we're gonna do now is we're gonna unplug this guy and that should shut off I got two things at once and this might be a little tricky with me holding the camera but this you have to hold the mode button before you plug in Ethernet and then you continue to hold a mode button until on the serial interface it reads out and says release the mode button so that's what I'm gonna do so give me just one moment so as you see I'm holding the mode button and I plug in the ethernet and now what we're gonna wait for on this dialog box is a status update and what we'll do is as soon as it goes all the way through and it reboots it's gonna stare this so it says button is pressed waiting for a button to be released that's the last bit down there okay so I've released the button and a couple of things are happening now you can see that your default TFTP server has started showing that it's transferring files so this tells you that you it's been successful and it's updating the file that's bringing it as you can see here that's the file that we uploaded right k9w seven - star dot default so that it's found it and it's probably gonna take about 10 minutes to actually transfer the files there's a couple of software configuration settings so it's gonna run through all of this installation and packages once all of this is done this guy is going to restart and then you can do another show version and you will now see that it'll say k9w seven not the eight but the seven and you will have successfully converted this to an autonomous configuration so you can I don't know hook this up to your like set home DHCP server and then use it as an extension Wi-Fi it's a commercial-grade so it should be very well um as I mentioned this is gonna take a little while but once it's complete it'll restart and then and then you're done thanks for watching

Channel: Dan The Technology Man

Views: 43,410

Keywords: Cisco, LAP, access point, light weight, wireless, internet, wireless issues, how to, tips, router, convert, Cisco router, beginner guide, AP, technician, technical, technical issues, covid-19, issues, internet issues, router issues

Id: PrS_zcBtUf8

Length: 12min 33sec (753 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 16 2018