Recently we got an order of Cisco 1142 Access Points in. What we discovered was that if you order a 5 pack you end up with Autonomous Access Points.  If you order the 10 pack you can choose Autonomous or LWAPP.  Anyway we needed the ones we ordered to be LWAPP for the environment they were destined for.  So we did what we normally do and we fired up the AP conversion tool…wait for it…but it does not support conversion of the 1142.  Yeah that’s right the conversion tool wont convert the 1142N APs.  So after about 3 seconds of digging I found this Convert 1142 to LWAPP.

That link gives you 99% of what you need to pull this off.  The rest is a valid CCO account and the hardware.  To do mine quickly I setup a spare 3750-PoE switch we had on our bench.  Keeping it quick and dirty I just set it up as follows using my console cable for the the CLI input:

 

DO NOT DO THIS ON A PRODUCTION SWITCH!  YOU WILL PISS PEOPLE OFF!  This is intended for LAB and STAGING purposes ONLY!

 

Conf t

interface range switchport 0/1/1 –24

switchport access vlan 1

interface vlan 1

ip address 10.1.1.1

no shut

exit

ip dhcp-pool AP

network 10.1.1.0 255.255.255.0

 

default-router 10.1.1.1

 

end

wr mem

 

With that done it was simply a matter of plugging in all of the AP, my laptop and validating that they all got IP addresses from the switch:

sh ip dhcp binding

Once all 6 devices had IPs I started my TFTP server and moved my console cable from AP to AP and issued:

archive download-sw  tftp://x.x.x.y/c1140-rcvk9w8-tar.124-21a.JA.tar

Using my laptops IP address and the name of the recovery image that I pulled down.  And 23 to 25 seconds later per AP they were converted to LWAPP.  The final step was to reboot them and watch the initial CAPWAP syslog message display.  And just like that and 10 minutes of my time the APs were ready to roll.  Minus the switch config and the file download this process should take no more than a 60 seconds per AP.  And now all your Access Points are belong to controller.