We all know how the first day or two of orientation goes like; you meet the rest of your colleagues, get setup with the payroll, and of course, configure a Cisco Aironet 1141 Access Point from scratch for a client! This is my first time ever touching one of these devices I've read so much about in my previous job, but hey, it beats the hell out of doing password resets for end users, so I'm not complaining. Anyways, I plugged in the power, the console cable and brought up a terminal to configure it, I've got the enable prompt now, time to run a 'config t'. Expecting a config prompt, I instead receive % Invalid input detected at '^' marker. I checked and double checked that I typed the command correctly, but still no luck. Being the new guy, I figured I must be doing something wrong, so I resort to consulting with my boss and other members on the team; they appear to be just as stumped as I am.
OKAY, time to hit up my good friend Google for some assistance, and we're in luck! The first result pointed out that the IOS image preloaded with my particular part # was a Controller-based and not Standalone AP, luckily I've read a little about these devices in my previous job to know the difference, basically with the Controller-based (aka Lightweight) Access Points, all the configuration and management is done on a Wireless LAN Controller and downloaded to the AP; you CANNOT issue configuration commands like you would on any other Cisco IOS device, directly. Alright, so the solution seems simple enough, procure a Standalone version of the AP, but wait, even better, apparently we can just download and load the AP we already have with a Standalone image! :)
While I discovered all this info by myself (with a little help from Google) one of our senior techs in another city just figured it out too. Once we got the right image loaded onto the device, we could then enter configuration mode and dump on the config. I knew victory was mine once I got one of our test laptops associated with the SSID, although the DHCP config was missing, mission accomplished. So this is my first entry into the journal I will be keeping on my adventures at this new position, I hope this has been both helpful and entertaining to my fellow Cisco guys out there.
If any of you run into this problem, this is a great resource to steer you in the right direction
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