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C H A P T E R 7 Console Port Use and Troubleshooting
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Use of the Console Port
Purpose of Console Port If you lose contact with the switch and the Recovery Manager in Intel
Device View or Local Management over the LAN cannot contact it,
then the following is possible via the Console port on the front of the
switch.
Local Management During normal operation (the switch is running and the Status LED is
green) the Console port will give access to a menu, identical to the
one accessible via a telnet connection to the switch. The menu allows
configuration of basic parameters, extensive monitoring, flash opera-
tions, reset of the switch etc.
Maintenance Mode If the switch is failing for some reason (System LED goes red), and
cannot start correctly after a reset, this may be caused by either hard-
ware failure, corruption of the software, or corruption of the switch
configuration. To allow recovery from such a situation when the Re-
covery Manager of Intel Device View cannot be applied, the mainte-
nance mode is provided. In the following, various problems are
described as well as the way they are solved using maintenance mode.
In the next section it is explained how to start and use the maintenance
mode.
Note Loading software to the switch in Maintenance Mode
should only be done as a last resort, the reason being that
the software and configuration are already resident in the
flash memory is overwritten and lost.
Switch Software The software for the switch (including a default configuration) re-
sides in the switch’s flash memory. A backup of the software is pro-
vided on the CD delivered with the switch, and the newest software
versions may be downloaded via the Internet. The software files may
be used for restoring or upgrading the switch software.
Restoring Software The switch software may be restored/downloaded from a TFTP serv-
er, if the current software in flash memory has been corrupted. The
TFTP and BOOTP commands may both be used to accomplish this.
For the TFTP command an external TFTP server with the software
must be present on the network. For the BOOTP command a BOOTP/
TFTP server (also often referred to as a boot server) must be present.
500.book Page 106 Thursday, September 2, 1999 1:17 PM