priming 1142 ap's

[Shawn Purdy]

Hello all. I've noticed that I've had to prime a lot of the 1142 devices. When attached to the network they not seem to find the controller. The subnet has the scope option and I have other 1142s working but recent ap's seem to not work unless primed. Has anyone else seen this?

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[Scott Fella]

It varies really... were these AP's new, converted or was initially joined to another WLC?  The easiest way to join the AP's to the WLC is to place the AP's on the same subnet as the management of the WLC, once they join, you can put them in any vlan you wish.  DNS is another good option.

[Shawn Purdy]

ok that's what we've been doing. These are brand new ap's. In the past we've been able to configure them from anywhere but lately it appears that we should do as you mentioned and place it on the local subnet of the controller network.

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[George Stefanick]

Shawn,

First, it important to under stand HOW an AP finds a controller.

1) Option 43 - The dhcp server will send the controller ip in the DHCP response packet

2) DNS - The AP will attempt to resolve CISCO-LWAPP-CONTROLLER or CISCO-CAPWAP-CONTOLLER, where you would then have a A record pointing to your controller.

3) Manual Prime - Just that, manually enter in the controller ip into the AP from teh CLI

4) OTAP - Disconntinuted since 6.x code.

5) IP FORWARD - I nice little nugget here .. Also helps in a bind. You can UDP forward 5246 and use the WLCs management interface.

6) BROADCAST - As Scott mentioned. Put the AP on the same subnet as the WLC.