Sorry this reply took so long. I got it working shortly after posting. So what had happened was, the big rackmount firewall(pfsense) used to hand out IP addresses went down. I was really supprised not to see the almond + get past the black and white boot screen. I'm guessing this is because it is an AP and if it can't get an IP address it just doesn't want to go any futher. Is that intended?
After rebooting the firewall, and unplug/plug power to almond everything was running fine.