Monthly Archives: June 2015

Place Cisco 1720i Access Point into Autonomous mode

If you are like me you occasionally need to setup a single AP into a site either too small for a controller, or unwilling to pay the extra costs associated with one. Here are the steps required to change to Autonomous mode, as I believe that all of the x702i series are shipping in lightweight mode by default.

  1. Log into www.cisco.com
  2. Click “Support” at the top
  3. Click the “Downloads” tab
  4. Select the “Wireless” from the left hand pane”
  5. Select “Access Points”
  6. Select “Cisco 1700 Series Access Points”
  7. Select “Cisco Aironet 1702i Access Points”
  8. Click “Autonomous AP IOS Software”
  9. Ideally, you are looking for the highest number firmware revision that’s marked as MD, or GD. In some cases you’ll only see ED revisions, downloaded the highest revision number. Click the “Download” button, and agree to the terms of service.
  10. Connect a network cable from your PC to the AP.
  11. Start a TFTP server on your computer, and set your interface to 10.0.0.1 255.255.255.0.
  12. Open a Serial connection to the AP, after it finishes booting log in. [Default Password:Cisco ]
  13. Enter the following commands, pressing enter after each line:
    1. enable
    2. debug capwap console cli
    3. debug capwap client no-reload
    4. capwap ap ip address 10.0.0.2 255.255.255.0
    5. capwap ap ip default-gateway 10.0.0.1
    6. Archive download-sw /force /overwrite tftp://10.0.0.1/%File Name%.tar
  14. The AP will reboot automatically. After its finished the reboot, log back in and issue the following command:
    1. show version
  15. Verify the AP is now running the updated image, and that you have access to the full suite of commands.

NOTE: you’ll notice that you keep getting a capwap error while the AP is in lightweight mode, if you are having trouble entering these commands because of it, put them all into a notepade file, wait for the error to appear, and then quickly paste them all in at once.