How To Flash Cisco Access Points With Xmodem And Tera Term To Latest Autonomous IOS Firmware

so today we're going to go ahead and go over how to flash the older generation of cisco access points the one i'm going to be doing is the 3702i now you might be asking yourself why would i want to go ahead and know how to flash some of the older cisco access points well these 3702 waveone ac access points can be had for like 20 or 30 dollars a piece on ebay you can throw a few of them up in your house with a wireless lan controller and and you will pretty much pull the doors off of most the consumer and equipment out there this is ac so you'll probably be topping on real world performance of around 60 megabytes a second per stream or per client and you'll get enterprise class stability keep in mind these things are used in hospitals schools and other industry environments where stability is a must so with that said let's go ahead and go over some of the equipment we'll need we're going to need a usb to rj45 cisco console cable or just general rj45 console cable which can be had on ebay for i think about eight dollars next thing you're gonna need is you're gonna be able to need to power your access point so in order to do that you're going to want to make sure you have either a poe power injector an ac adapter or a poe switch which will connect to your ethernet port on the back of the cisco access point as long as the cisco access point you've purchased supports poe functionality anything you need is just a standard rj845 to rj45 cable you're going to be needing this for the flash procedure and if you are using the poe method you're gonna need one more of these cables for me i will personally be using a switch that has poe capability so i'll just be getting power straight from the switch into the access point now let's go ahead and get started on a basic breakdown of the flash procedure so we're going to be flashing this access point to an autonomous image from a lightweight image now the reason we're doing that is because a lot of people maybe just gonna buy two of these or or maybe just one and they just wanna go ahead and use it as a regular access point for cisco stability but they're not deploying like a large network that's going to require a heavy amount of constant load so they just want to set up the access point itself and they're not going to need a wireless lan controller for controlling multiple cisco access points in our enterprise class environment so in order to use just one or two of these or you know we're going to do the autonomous method which means we're going to flash it from the lightweight to the autonomous image which will give you basic gui functionality in most cases now on some of the newer ios images for these older access points you have to enable http functionality for security reasons and just doesn't come on by default anymore and you have to do a few other configuration steps to get the access point moving and then you'll be able to log into the web-based gui do the configuration from there and the procedure is not that hard if you haven't done a lot of cli work it's just a few basic commands and you're good to go now we are going to be using the x modem method to send the image over to here which is the best method to use if you run into a problem or one of these is bricked or the flash is corrupted the only problem with it is it does take a while to transfer you can expect all the way up to an hour just for the image to send over here because you're going to be limited from by the baud rate that you have set because you're going to be sending it over cereal which is not that fast so you should go ahead and plug your console cable into your computer now after you do that go over to your access point and plug in the rj45 end of your console cable into the access point i'm gonna go ahead and prep the rj45 cable this is what we're going to be using to get both power and data to the access point so i'm not going to be plugging into the access point yet i'm going to go ahead and plug it straight over into my poe switch and there's cheeto he helps me with a lot of my videos he's just an old son connor i like to sit there he likes it where he put it pretty much okay let's go over here get you back there like that okay so you're plugged in and good to go and turn around back around here and just lay the rj45 cable right there because we're not gonna be using it right now and for the next process we're going to be doing because we don't want to turn on just yeah we want to go ahead and prep our software environment now okay so i'm on my windows machine what we're going to want to go ahead and do is we're going to want to go ahead and prep our windows environment for the cisco access point flash up the best way to probably actually do this would be to use linux and the reason i say that is linux just in general is a more stable operating environment to be doing command line work especially when it comes to working with firmware images and doing proprietary procedures like this but for this method we're going to do the windows method just because it's easier and we're going to do a stable terminal called terra term so let's go ahead and get started so in order to do that we're just going to go ahead and type in terra term and you can either go to their git link and build it via the source i just like to download from their products home page just saves me the time from building so you go here and click download and then you'll see tara term 4.106. just go ahead and click the xe to download install it and after it's installed you'll have a pretty icon on your desktop like mine right there and that's what we're going to be using so go ahead and launch teraterm go ahead and select zero right here and the nice part about this is it already has your com port right here so unlike putty where you actually have to go in and type the com it actually already has it here which saves some time and it's pretty nice although i wish whenever you'd open this up it'd remember your last choice it doesn't unfortunately okay so now we did that we're going to go ahead and insert our poe rj45 ethernet cable and while i'm inserting this cable i'm going to be holding the mode button down and you're going to want to be holding this for quite a while i believe it's like around 30 to 60 seconds for it to go past the factory default with the mode button and then just go straight to raman it says waiting for a button to be released i'd go ahead and hold it for another 30 seconds if you don't hold it long enough it'll just do a factory default and if you have the lightweight image you'll keep trying to communicate with the wireless lan controller okay so i'm going to go ahead and release the button now okay so it dropped me right into rama mode so the first thing we're going to go ahead and do here is type in format flash colon enter are you sure yes enter the reason we're doing this is because we just want to fresh start we want to delete any configurations off here and any ios software that's on here we just want a fresh start okay maximize it here for all to see better okay so it has confirmed formatted next thing we're going to want to go ahead and do here is type in set capital b a u d for the baud rate and then type in 1 1 5 2 0 0 enter now right after you do this you should notice a lot of weird characters so you won't notice any characters at all and you'll notice when you push enter it seems like it's not responding that's because the baud rates changed and that's the communication speed between the access point and your terminal here so what you want to go ahead and do here is click on setup and then go down to serial port and then go ahead change this 9600 to two zero zero click on new setting here and just go ahead and press enter again as you see it's starting to respond again it's because we got the terminal now at the correct speed they weren't in sync so now that they're in sync it's working now what we need to go ahead and do is go ahead and reboot the access point and the reason we're doing this is a lot of times even though you set the baud rate and the terminal is functioning correctly at that baud rate speed and the x model command won't function correct at that baud rate speed so to ensure that doesn't happen what you're going to go ahead and do is just reset the access point now but unplug in the ethernet cable and plugging it back in and you're also not going to have to worry about hitting the mode button or anything this time because you format the flash so it's just going to drop right into the bootloader mode which is ramen mode oh quick thing so before we go ahead and get start with the exponent flash procedure a lot of y'all probably wondering hey where do i get the ios files and how do i get them cisco is very tight on their ios files and they usually want you to have a partnership with cisco or to be in school or there's a few other ways you can get partnership with them to get access to their ios files i will let you in on a hint though there are some developers and some other people from the forms and the cisco community and just cisco enthusiasts in general that do share the ios files with each other usually they're on forms irc channels but there's a good one [Music] it has something to do with ios files and cisco and telegram i'll let y'all search for it if you can find it you can find some ios files on there to do your flashing a lot of the developers share and post them back and forth through torrents and it's just a cisco group i wouldn't spread it around too much because it probably won't be there and i don't encourage any type of copyright infringement but for y'all that are doing your own labs or you're in schools or deploying a network for a client i realize you have to have access to those files and if you don't have a cisco account and you're on financial strain and you just need and you're in possession of the hardware then if you do some searching you can find something otherwise i can't share any links or anything i'm sorry i wish i could maybe i'll visit me on my discord or send me a message i might be able to help you i'll find an ios file or something and now for the x modem flash procedure so now we're going to want to do here is we're going to go ahead and get the file name into the clipboard for the x modem command so let me go ahead and go to my ios firmware images so we can get that name copied over into the clipboard w7 being the autonomous images rename copy go back to our term now i'm going to go ahead and type in copy x modem colon flash colon shift insert or right click and hit enter now it's going to go ahead and say begin the x minimum or 1k transfer now so i'm going to go ahead and go up to file transfer x modem send i'm gonna go ahead and choose that file that i copied the name of into the clipboard and as you can see it's transferring now so i'm not gonna go ahead and make out wait for all that we're just going to come back after it finishes and we'll go from there okay so as y'all can see the x modem copy command has completed successfully now we're going to go ahead and extract that tar image so we're going to go ahead and type in tar dash extract flash colon slash go over here and highlight that file name right click space flash colon so it's kind of just like the linux cp command you're typing tar dash extract then if then you're specifying the source and then you're supposed to find the destination what is a little bit different here is the colon that kind of sets some people off especially when you're new to cisco then we're just going to go ahead and hit enter here so now it's extracting that file into the root of the flash and now depending on your raman mode and your access point there's a chance you might have to set that binary file with set boot for it to boot but usually that's not the case and you just go ahead and restart when this process is finished and it will boot right into the new cisco ios okay so the extraction process is finished here we can go ahead and restart the access point and we are good to go should boot right up into the cisco ios so let's just go ahead and unplug that rj45 if you happen to be powering it via poe like i am i'm just gonna go ahead and plug that where in it it says you can see it says unable to locate ios image with name that's because the set boot variable isn't set but as you can see it found it anyway and it started posting it because it had a default search uh procedure so i went ahead and said hey let's go ahead and see if there's any other files on here we can boot from and it boot right into it so you don't have to set that boot variable but in some cases you might i usually never worry about it to be honest with y'all so as you can see we have an ap prompt now go ahead and type enable and just type in cisco capital c enter and we're in one thing too y'all on some of the newer cisco ios releases for the access points that are ac wave one and under at least from i noticed maybe on wave two as well you have to manually enable the http server now and set like a password and sometimes even ips so you can go ahead and get into that web-based ui configuration page so if you do the flash procedure you're like hey why isn't my access point showing up on the dhcp server like it usually does or why can't i access the web-based ui that's why there's nothing wrong with your access point you didn't do anything wrong with the flash procedure it's just like that the newer ios files from what i've seen might not be like that with all of them but for a lot of the newer ones especially with these ac wave one and under access points it's like that so you didn't do anything wrong you got just you just gotta do some extra manual config now so uh if that helped y'all go ahead and like and subscribe maybe support the channel if you want if you have a tutorial request go ahead and send it over if you do support the channel uh people with that have supported the channel and have a tutorial request will have priority so anyway if you like my material and everything like it subscribe

Channel: FIX A PC

Views: 569

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Id: E9yFZiR5XjQ

Length: 19min 18sec (1158 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 12 2021