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I purchased handful of Motorola AP8232's on eBay for my home network.  "as-is, no returns".  These don't boot up like all the other Motorola AP's I've worked with, nor are they running a familiar version of WiNG.

These are running BootOS 5.5.0.0-173506X and won't actually let you login to the standard CLI. Most Motorola APs use 19.2k for the serial console, but these ones are running 115.2k.  You can use the standard "reset/factoryDefault" login to set them to factory defaults, but that won't help.  After a few errors and timouts, it'll dump you to a either a boot# or diag> prompt.  You can even get to a linux root shell through the "service start-shell" command!

My guess is that this firmware is an engineering build and you can do all sorts of interesting things.  I'm not interested in getting that in-depth with this AP.  All I really wanted was a handful of enterprise-grade 802.11ac access points.

After a little bit of hacking around, I finally figured out how to get it to run production WiNG code!  I'll save the how-to for another blog post.  I just wanted to get this out there in case anyone else has similar APs and wants help getting them up and running.

Truncated serial console output from the engineering build, along with the failed/timed out login:

[ 85.322215] ge1 { autoneg'ed 1Gb/s, autoneg'ed full duplex, Cu }
Waiting for system initialization to complete.............................[ 167.852645] CCB:15:MROUTER Po rt ge1 detected on Vlan 1
.
process "/usr/sbin/snmpd -f" started


Please press Enter to activate this console.
ap8232-A3632C login: admin
Password:
Unable to connect to configuration-manager: Resource temporarily unavailable
Login incorrect
ap8232-A3632C login: admin
Password:


Login timed ou
Please press Enter to activate this console.
ap8232-A3632C login: admin
Password:
Unable to connect to configuration-manager: Resource temporarily unavailable
Welcome to CLI


Unable to connect to configuration-manager, executing limited diagnostic shell


==== WARNING ====


The CLI process has not initialized.
Please exit this shell and try again.
If this problem persists then this shell
provides a limited subset of commands
to allow you to restore the system to
a working state. Please use "help" or "?"
to see a list of available commands.
diag >set
boot Boot commands
delete Deletes specified file from the system.
exit Exit from the CLI
help Description of the interactive help system
logout Exit from the CLI
reload Halt and perform a warm reboot
service Service Commands
show Show running system information
upgrade Upgrade firmware image