Once I hooked up the AP-325 to the power and LAN and it had booted. This took a few minutes I was able to login to the device. The AP is by default assigned a DHCP address.
After the first login you are asked about where the access point is located.
In my case I’m in Switzerland, so I selected this, and then I was presented with the UI.
In case you aren’t aware, selecting the country where you have you access point is down to that you need to limit certain radio signals that may be in use for other things in
Firmware Upgrade
The next thing I do normally is to upgrade the Access point firmware.
You do this from the UI by going to the Maintenance tab on the left and select Firmware.
Click the “Check for new version”. If there is a new version you will prompted to upgrade.
Click on the “Upgrade Now” button.
After you click on OK, you are logged out after a short while and taken back to the login screen above. After a few minutes you can log in again.
Once you can login again, go to the firmware upgrade page. You should see a new firmware has been installed and if you check for firmware, there is nothing available.
Regulatory upgrade
Next, you should check the “Regulatory” menu also (In my case that’s why I had a notification in the upper right corner. Regulatory upgrades are updates that are added to your WLAN setup in case that there are changes to what channels are allowed and so on. It is a small update and normally completes fairly quickly. You can find more about the updates for ArubaOS here.
Again, you could check for a new version and then click on “Upgrade now”
This upgrade should go fairly fast, and you get an upgrade successful after it completes.
Basic Configuration
Lets configure a few minimal changes to secure things, because you get a wide open AP after everything is started. Typically starting with SetMeUp-Last-Part-of-MAC
Probably we should also change the admin password.
Both things are configurable under “Configuration –> System” (A little bit hidden). Here are the Admin settings:
For now I will just do some basic changes to secure it, I will dive into parts of these things in later posts.
To configure a WLAN you need to go to “Configuration –> Networks”. You will see a few default ones in there, including the “SetMeUp-MAC” network. Click on the plus below to create a new network.
Enter a name, then select the type of Network you are configuring, in this case Wireless. the other option is Wired. Then select primary usage, in my case it will be employee.
Click on Next, here you will assign Client IP assignment and VLAN. I leave both at default for now.
Next we get to security. I will stick to the Personal setting for now, and dive in later in more advanced configurations. Next, Key Management I go with WPA2-Personal at the moment. As you can see below you have quite a few options when it comes to security, even on a personal level.
Final step is to create access rules, I will leave it at unrestricted for now, but you can see again that there are quite a few settings to play around with.
Click on Finish the create the network. You should now see the WLAN you created in the overview. The SetMeUp network will disappear after a few moments.
As you can see it is also gone from the overview screen, my new WLAN has appeared though.
After I connected I can now see that I have one client connected:
That is about it for this post.