We have a Crisco Aironet 430 that had an unknown management password.

Someone followed a procedure found a Crisco website that was supposed
to revert the unit to factory settings and allow us to put a new
password in.  Unfortunately, this procedure was wrong either entirely
or just for the particular firmware version we were running-- and the
result is that the unit has lost its "Installation Key".

Without this key, the unit runs in an extremely crippled fashion--
probably some kind of demo mode--  because it won't do WEP and it won't
allow more than one node to associate with it.  Nice...

Crisco says the unit is toast and we have to send it back for repair.
It's out of warranty and I can't believe it would be cost effective
to ship it to them, pay their service charge and ship it back-- when
I can go to Best Buy and get any number of comparable units for
~$180.

Has anyone experienced this bit of Crisco Rocket Science?  Is there
another way out before we put this baby in the morgue?

It would seem that if I had the 60 byte Installation Key file... I might be
able to xmodem it onto the thing using a download or upload
(depending on who is up and who is down :-)  ) function that I saw
on one of the menus.

I have seen numerous web postings where people have apparently experienced
this same bit of botchery and Cisco has provided them with the key to
fix the problem.  For us, they have taken the position that we have to
send it back and they won't offer up any key.

Chris

-- 
Chris Elmquist   mailto:chrise at pobox.com   http://www.pobox.com/~chrise