Marco’s mind raced. He had a backup of the config. He had a spare 7240 in the storage room—a refurb he’d begged the finance director to approve. But the spare was running the same ancient version as the dead one. To recover, he’d have to console into the dead controller, break the boot cycle, load a clean image from a TFTP server, and pray the flash wasn’t fried.

These are standalone APs that do not require a hardware controller.

He hadn’t read that far. He’d trusted the upgrade path checker. But the checker had a bug. And now the bug owned him.

He mashed the spacebar like it owed him money.