2005-02-10 #1

Professional Equipment

Last night I killed my wireless access point. While trying to upload a new firmware it stopped doing anything and in my ignorance I simply plugged the cable. The device is a Cisco Aironet 350 which is made to be used in "hostile" environments. This device does not have a reset button and is covered in some rubber like material. Very rough. The only way to get it back was by reactivating an old laptop and a serial cable. Fortunately it has some kind of boot loader which was where it was stuck. I simply was not patient enough to wait for the new firmware to unpack and install itself. The recovery procedure explained how to upload the firmware image into the device via Xmodem using a the windows terminal program. After doing so I could watch the recovery which took about fifteen minutes.

What was it all for? The release notes told me a lot about WDS. Something I wished for for a long time. I need to extend my wireless network as only ⅓ (including living room, area and kitchen) of the apartment are covered. WDS is a way to extend the range. With the Airport Express this would be such a nice little setup. And I could also stream music to my sound system.

Now I have IOS on that device, an operating system that many fear. However, the web frontend looks easy enough and I had the box up and running with my original config in a few minutes. Just the WDS, the dream I did this all for, will not work on an Aironet 350 Access Point :(.