Cisco 140AC AP set up two months ago, now won't allow clients to connect, shows "excluded"

[dan.gingerich]

I can't seem to find another occurrence of this anywhere, no matter where I search.  I'm hoping someone has encountered this and knows how to get it to work. 

My sister bought a Cisco 140AC small business AP two months ago, and I set it up for her.  (I'm a sysadmin working cloud support, so I'm no amateur.  I've worked with many home routers and small business APs in my career.)   We got it specifically so she would have an AP that did not have WPS so they'd have a secure network.  The initial setup went well, and I had every thing up and running in a matter of 20 minutes.

Fast forward two months, and suddenly my sister is unable to connect anything to the AP.  In the one Windows 10 machine she has, it shows it trying to connect, and then just fails.  phones and tablets and a printer that had previously connected fine suddenly can't, all at the same time.  The list of clients just shows them as "excluded".  She's tried rebooting the AP repeatedly, and it goes through the boot sequence, and at the end just goes into a blinking green cycle instead of a solid green. 

I've checked the cable modem and the router (Cisco RV320) and they're both fine, and connecting wired devices without issue.  It's just the wireless that is having this problem. 

I live over 100 miles from her, and I would REALLY prefer to not have to drive down there to fix this.  I'm not even sure what it would take.  That's partly why I recommended this AP to her, so that I would not have to mess with it often.  Does anyone here know why it is doing this and how to correct it?

[MHM Cisco World]

Are it connect to WLC? Are WLC AP connection is up or down?

[dan.gingerich]

No, no wireless lan controller, just the stand alone access point.

[dan.gingerich]

Does anyone have any ideas? 

[patoberli]

Sounds like it has either an issue or is broken. I would first try to factory reset it and if that doesn't help, replace it.

I never used the SMB products, but there are probably several updates available. Here the latest version: https://software.cisco.com/download/home/286324956/type/286325362/release/10.3.1.0

[dan.gingerich]

I do know it has the latest software version.  I updated it when I put it in, and had my sister check it in the process of troubleshooting. 

I'm going to have to go down there on Sunday and see if I can get Cisco support on it once I'm down there.  I was hoping to avoid another completely wasted day.  At least she has a workaround for now. 

[dan.gingerich]

I was thinking about this problem and came up with a different question on this: Where does the 140AC keep its SSID config when set up as stand alone? 

If it keep that info locally, then this issue is likely local.  If it keeps it on Cloud servers, then this problem might have come up because it couldn't retrieve the info from the Cloud.  I could narrow things down.

[Rich R]

Like Pat I've never used that product but I doubt the config would be in cloud, almost certainly local NVRAM.

The update Pat pointed you to (10.3.1.0) was only released 26-Aug-2020 - less than 2 months ago - are you sure it's already using that?