Access Points Light Weight to Autonomous Conversion and vice versa

This document describes the process that we have to take care of while converting LWAPP Access Point to IOS Access Point (Autonomous) and then vice versa.

Following are the three types of Access Points IOS, we have to download the correct IOS type before starting the conversion process.

k9w7: autonomous IOS
k9w8: full lightweight IOS (this is what is bundled in the WLC .aes image, and is factory installed on “mesh” APs)
rcvk9w8: lightweight recovery image – this is factory installed on lightweight APs, unless a “mesh” image is specified; it lacks radio firmware

We proceed to the conversion by following these steps:
Step 1: Download TFTPd32, and install it on the PC, we point the image that we have downloaded in the TFTP server.

Step 2: We connect an Ethernet cable to the AP, both should be in the same subnet, we also connect a console cable to get access to the AP CLI, make sure you are able to ping the AP.

Step 3: In our case we use Cisco Aironet 1142 Access point and we configure the IP addresses as follow:
• PC IP address: 10.10.10.1/24
• AP IP address: 10.10.10.2/24

Step 4: Convert the Access Point from Light weight to autonomous using the following commands:

AP>enable
AP#debug capwap console cli (or debug lwapp console cli)
AP#configure terminal
APconfig#ip default-gateway 10.10.10.1
AP(config)#interface bvi 1
APconfig-if)#ip address 10.10.10.2 255.255.255.0
APconfig-if)#no shutdown
APconfig-if)#end
AP#archive download-sw /force-reload/overwrite tftp://10.10.10./c1140-k9w7-tar.124-25d.JA.tar

For the LWAP conversion, use the recovery image (c1140-rcvk9w8-tar.124-25d.JAL.tar). We can use the same command on the autonomous AP privilege mode.

!
AP#archive download-sw/force-reload/overwrite tftp://10.10.10.1/c1140-rcvk9w8-tar.124-25d.JA.tar
!

Useful Links: https://mrncciew.com/2012/10/20/lightweight-to-autonomous-conversion/