Recently I installed several Ruckus Access Points at a customer’s site. This customer has several large rooms and was in urgent need of a stable and available internet supply in all rooms.
At this customer’s site, I installed several Ruckus models managed by Ruckus Unleashed. This is a free (Cloud) service from Ruckus and works for up to 25 devices while offering all the advanced features.
To use this functionality, your access points need to be equipped with the “unleashed” firmware, which you can simply download from the Ruckus website. To save costs, I offered a combination of new and refurbished devices. Some devices were already equipped with this unleashed firmware while others were still running on the default firmware.
In this blog post, I describe how you can convert these access points to unleashed.
The 1st step is to reset your access point (AP) to factory default. Make sure your AP is connected and has PoE + Ethernet cable. Press the reset button with a paper clip or something similar for 10 seconds, and then release it. Your AP will reset itself and come online within a few minutes.
Tip: a Configure.Me-XXXX wifi SSID appears when your AP is booted.
The AP now gets an IP address from your DHCP server by default. If it is not available, then it gets 192.168.0.1 as the default IP. I use angry ip scanner to scan the subnet for new devices. In this example, the AP got the IP address 192.168.178.190.
Open the management interface with Firefox (Edge or other browsers may give problems)
We are now logged into the management interface of the AP. Now go to Maintenance Upgrade to download the unleashed firmware. Which is available for free download here. Using a ruckus account is mandatory, but you can create one for free.
Choose Local (we will upload the firmware locally) and select your firmware.
The firmware will now be uploaded, do not turn off the AP!
When the firmware is uploaded, the AP will reboot.
After some time, you will get a message that it is ready :
Make sure that there is a cable connected to the AP, and it will automatically be added to your existing unleashed network. The new AP will first appear as disconnected. After some time you will see that it has been automatically added and has taken over the configuration. If a new firmware needs to be installed, this will be done automatically first.
