Help with some Mesh Ap1130's that crashed during firmware update ; Somewhat long story.

[mikelustman]

So I have five 100ft poles, with 1130ap on each one. The two poles furthest from each other run POE to a switch that has internet access. The three in the middle were meshing to each other and the two far 1130AP's that do have internet. Setup worked ok. All five had internet access and broadcasted SSID correctly.

Problem: I was doing firmware updates. I was new to this style of mesh networking. I didn't realise exactly how the mesh was configured. I managed to update the two truely wired AP's which than rebooted before the three meshed ap's coud finish firmware update. So now mesh doesn't work, (been 4 months); I think the three mesh only AP's either have "lower vers level firmware" or "corrupted firmware" I cannot climb the 100ft poles to get at the three mesh 1130AP's that haven't talked to CAPWAP in 4 months or so. My question is how do I get back into communicating with them. They do have an ethernet line that runs to a junction box in bottom of the pole. It has a poe injector but no actual data into the POE box, I was wondering if I can hook my laptop into that empty data POE port and SSH in to the Ap's but they don't seem to have an IP, or SSH user configured. Anyone have any thing I could try short of a 100ft boom lift, uninstall of AP taking it to an internet connected POE switch remove cover and press reset buttons etc?

[AnonymousM]

Mike,

A few things you can run to provide more information and possibly an alternative solution. If you SSH into one or both of the wired AP1130s and run the following commands and note some details for us.

show hive

This will show the name of the hive object that the two APs are using that you can reach. This is key as the hive object being configured the same is a key in Aerohive APs establishing a mesh link. The default is hive0, if you pre-configure one, it should also show up here. Note these.

show hive <hive name> neighbor

This will show any mesh links or attempted mesh links that are using this AP as it's backhaul. There is probably not anything here as you said the links have been down for months.

show acsp neighbor (you can also run "show acsp neighbor | i yes" to show just Aerohive RF neighbors)

This will show you the RF neighbors of the AP(s). Aerohive and non-Aerohive. Since you should know the MAC address of the APs that are not able to be reached, we can calculate the BSSID that they are transmitting (if they're transmitting anything). If you're building a mesh network on the 5 GHz radios, take the base AP MAC and increment the last two digits 24. So if the base MAC was 00:19:77:AA:BB:C0 (Aerohive base radios always end in 0), the 1st 5 GHz BSSID will be 00:19:77:AA:BB:E4 (remember its HEX). Do you see this MAC (or something that looks like it might be from the stranded APs)? If so, the Ssid/Hive column of this command shows you the hive object in use by said stranded AP. Does it match what you saw from the show hive command? If not, that will cause them not to mesh.

If you do see those stranded APs AND they happen to be using hive0 as their hive object, you might be able to regain access to them. You'll simply want to apply hive0 back as the hive object of the network policy and push that out to the closest wired AP1130. This will put them both back on the same hive object. A show hive hive0 nei command can be ran to see if the link starts to build back.

Note that while Aerohive has or had some old documentation stating that the APs must be on the same firmware to mesh, this is in fact not true as I've deployed many mesh links where the APs were not using the same firmware. I would however recommend they be running the same firmware if you are able to recover them. They must have the same hive object and they have to be on the same channel (they should find each other if using Auto channel selection automatically).

[samantha_lynn]

The default username is always admin, and the default password will be one of these two:

aerohive

Aerohvie1

[mikelustman]

Thanks Sam, that is something I had not known about, I'll check and see if I get signal. Is there a default user password?

[samantha_lynn]

The only option other than physically accessing the device is to connect to the access console that broadcasts when an AP looses connection to the HiveManager (unless this is disabled, it's on by default). However, given the height of the AP, I'm not sure the access console SSID will be visible to ground level devices.

The SSID should start with AH- followed by a part of the devices MAC address. The credentials would be the same as SSHing in to the AP. Once connected to the console SSID, open the command prompt and run "ip config". Take the default gateway and SSH in to that address with Putty, this will take you to the CLI of the AP.