WLC 4402 TFTP Backup Troubleshoot

[drewby132]

We currently have an WLC 4402 Firewall on our network.  We are going  through and backing up the devices to a TFTP server, and have been able  to for our Cisco 3750G POE Switch and our Cisco 2821 Router.  We have  tried setting up several different TFTP servers on multiple machines on  the network, and are not able to backup the WLC to any of the TFTP  servers we setup.  We have tried Solarwinds, TFTP32, and have even tried  a FTP server, but none of them will work with the WLC.

On one occasion, we tried to setup the TFTP server on our domain controller, and when we attempted to upload the configuration, it said that it had completed, thoguh we could not find the file anywhere on the server.  It's also worthy to note that we diabled the firewall on these machines, and still could not get a backup to take. 

The software version that is in use is 4.2.112.0.  We have also tried making a backup through the CLI, but that has not been helpful to us either.

We have been at  this for multiple days, and are out of things to try.  Please advise.

[Scott Fella · Accepted solution]

I have used 3CDeamon for TFTP, etc and that program has not failed me. So one thing to make sure you do is tftp from a wired PC not a wireless PC. Now depending on how you subnets are, if your wired subnet is the same as your WLC management, it will fail. You might as well tftp from the service port. Configure the service port IP address if not done already to an IP address that is not routable on your network. Connect you laptop to the service port and configure your Ethernet NIC to be on the same subnet as the service port.

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[drewby132]

Thanks a bunch.  We were not aware that the TFTP server had to be a wired computer not on the managmenet subnet.  I configured a laptop and plugged it into the service port, and we were able to get some communication between the server and wlc.  I did have an issue with the tftp server not taking the file because of a "Bailing out to bad charactes" error, but was able to get it to work with the Solarwinds TFTP server by setting the path with a "/".  Thanks again for your help.

[Leo Laohoo]

TFTPd32