Convert Cisco APs from LWAP to Autonomous

A lot of companies are pulling out their old Cisco wireless infrastructure to upgrade or replace it all together. As a result its pretty easy to get your hands on older Cisco AP’s, unfortunately by default they require a special controller in order to function. If you want to turn your old Cisco LWAP AP into something other than a paperweight, you either need to get an older controller or convert the AP to Autonomous. The following snippet is what I had to do to convert my Cisco AP from LWAP to Autonomous. Surprisingly they don’t cover this sort of thing on the CCNA wireless exam; or at least not back when I took it.

Before you begin, just make sure you get the proper “k9w7” autonomous code; bear in mind that “k9w8” is the lightweight code. In my case I had an old Aironet 1130 AG Access Point, so I had to get my hands on the c1130-k9w7-tar.124-25d.JA.tar code. I also needed to setup a TFTP server inside the same vlan as the AP. After I consoled into the AP and logged in to it I had to do the following…

debug lwapp console cli
debug lwapp client no-reload

config t
int fa 0
 ip address 10.0.0.1 255.255.255.224
end

archive download-sw /force-reload /overwrite tftp://10.0.0.2/c1130-k9w7-tar.124-25d.JA.tar