FortiAP slow firmware upload over P2P link

Question

I'm waiting to hear back from Fortinet Support but wondering if anyone has any ideas here.

I've got about 100 FortiAPs being managed by a Fortigate. A bunch of them are behind a point to point unifi wireless setup. The P2P performance isn't amazing but it works. Latency and packet loss are minimal. Users get about 30Mbps up/down which is good enough for their purposes. The main issue I'm having though is upgrading firmware for these APs. I have a feeling this is due to tftp being the method for the upload which isn't great over slow links. It takes approximately 45 minutes to upload firmware to a single AP. The firmware is only 30 MB in size. If it was getting the same speed that users are getting on the SSIDs of this AP it should be much faster. What are some things I can do to increase the speed?

Two options I've though of are..

Enable SSH on the FortiAP and put a tftp server on my laptop and upgrade it locally. This would be a pain though as each building is on it's own P2P. So it would it would have to be done separately for 18 different buildings. Not to mention logging into each AP individually once the laptop is in the building.
Is there a way to use FTP or HTTPS instead of TFTP? I've had luck using FTP on Cisco devices when TFTP is too slow.

Any ideas?

jhussain_FTNT · Answer

Hi,

Are you uploading the Fortiap Firmware on the Fortigate via GUI and upgrading together all at a time.

You can upgrade the firmware few AP at a time instead of all together with the specifying the serial number on the below command

Upload the FortiAP image to the FortiGate unit.
For example, the Firmware file is FAP_22A_v4.3.0_b0212_fortinet.out and the server IP address is 192.168.0.100.

execute wireless-controller upload-wtp-image tftp FAP_22A_v4.3.0_b0212_fortinet.out 192.168.0.100

If your server is FTP, change tftp to ftp, and if necessary add your user name and password at the end of the command.
Verify that the image is uploaded:
execute wireless-controller list-wtp-image
Upgrade the FortiAP units:
exec wireless-controller reset-wtp all

If you want to upgrade only one FortiAP unit, enter its serial number instead of all.