How to Reset Cisco Catalyst 3750 Back to Factory Defaults

December 2, 2014December 2, 2014 / Christopher Paquin / Leave a comment

Need to reset your Cisco Catalyst 3750 back to the factory default settings? Have you forgotten your password? Well you have come to the right place. Note that I am assuming that you have already established a console connection to the switch using a Cisco serial cable (rollover cable).

First you need to power down the switch. Once the switch is powered off, hold down the mode button, and power the switch on. The switch will boot up and you should see the switch prompt as shown below.

Now type flash_init. Your output should be similar to what you see below

switch: flash_init
Initializing Flash…
flashfs[0]: 547 files, 19 directories
flashfs[0]: 0 orphaned files, 0 orphaned directories
flashfs[0]: Total bytes: 32514048
flashfs[0]: Bytes used: 15487488
flashfs[0]: Bytes available: 17026560
flashfs[0]: flashfs fsck took 11 seconds.
…done Initializing Flash.

Check out the contents of flash and locate config.text and vlan.dat (if it exists).

switch: dir flash:
Directory of flash:/

2 -rwx 564       <date>               vlan.dat
3 -rwx 1914      <date>               private-config.text
5 drwx 192       <date>               c2960-lanbasek9-mz.122-58.SE2
6 -rwx 3096      <date>               multiple-fs
7 -rwx 2289      <date>               config.text

Now delete the vlan.dat and config.text.

switch: del flash:config.text
Are you sure you want to delete “flash:config.text” (y/n)?y
File “flash:config.text” deleted

switch: del flash:vlan.dat
Are you sure you want to delete “flash:vlan.dat” (y/n)?y
File “flash:vlan.dat” deleted

Note that you can also just rename the config.text and vlan.dat if you are not certain that you want to delete them.

switch: rename flash:config.text flash:config.old

Now type boot, to reboot the switch. Once the switch is rebooted you will see the System Configuration Dialog, and will have the opportunity “to enter the initial configuration dialog”.

How to Manage Password Aging in Solaris, AIX, and Linux

April 4, 2014November 28, 2014 / Christopher Paquin

Its possible that sometime in your short, meaningless life, you may need to create an account that has a password that is set to never expire. This is somethimes the case with headless accounts and specialty accounts such as the type you might have to setup for monitoring or security scanning. You might also find yourself setting up shared headless accounts that have locked passwords in order to block direct logins. This second scenario can be especially troublesome when this is some sort of application or database user with cron jobs, as even an account without a password and expire and lock. If this occurs all of a users cron jobs will fail. All because the account expired.

So today we are going to configure a user password not to expire.

Lets start with Solaris. First lets unlock the account just in case.

passwd -d username

Now you can turn off password aging for a user with the command below.

passwd -x -1 username

You can then verify your config with the following.

passwd -s dmadmin

The output of the command above should look similar to what I have below. In this example our user id is myuser.

#passwd -s myuser
myuser  PS

Compare what you see above to the output below for our example myuser1, which includes the date that the password was last changed, the minimum number of days between password changes, the maximum number of days required between password changes, and the number of days of warning a user is given before a password expires. Standard system password aging and expiration still applies.

#passwd -s myuser1
myuser1  PS    09/30/13     7    28     7

Now lets move on to Linux. First lets ulock. Then we will configure the password to not expire. Then we can verify our work with the chage -l command.

passwd -u username

chage -m 0 -M 99999 -I -1 -E -1 username

change -l username

So now lets take a visit to AIX land. Remember to not stay long. Again, its always best to make sure that the current password is not locked. Then we configure the password to not expire. Finally we step back and admire our work.

chuser account_locked=false username

chuser maxage=0 username

lsuser -f USERNAME | fgrep expires

SuperUser in Linux

How to Unlock an account in Linux

How to Reset a Password on Unix

Much Todo About Linux/RHEL Passwords

Enycrypting Passwords Via SSL for Redhat Kickstart Configuration Files

How to disable an user account in Linux

How to Reset Cisco Catalyst 2960 Back to Factory Defaults

December 2, 2012August 10, 2016 / Christopher Paquin / 9 Comments

This is my first post in what I hope to be a long line of Cisco networking related posts, as I have just gotten my hands on a bit of used Cisco equipment and hope to use it to setup a home lab.

First step of setting up this home lab is to get my two Catalyst 2960s reset to factory defaults. So here is how you do it. Note that I am assuming that you have already established a console connection to the switch.

First,boot up the switch while holding down the MODE button until you see the following appear on the screen

Switch>
Boot Sector Filesystem (bs) installed, fsid: 2
Base ethernet MAC Address: 00:17:0e:17:de:80
Xmodem file system is available.
The password-recovery mechanism is enabled.

The system has been interrupted prior to initializing the
flash filesystem. The following commands will initialize
the flash filesystem, and finish loading the operating
system software:

flash_init
boot

Then type flash_init

switch: flash_init
Initializing Flash…
flashfs[0]: 547 files, 19 directories
flashfs[0]: 0 orphaned files, 0 orphaned directories
flashfs[0]: Total bytes: 32514048
flashfs[0]: Bytes used: 15487488
flashfs[0]: Bytes available: 17026560
flashfs[0]: flashfs fsck took 11 seconds.
…done Initializing Flash.

Check out the contents of flash and locate config.text and vlan.dat (if it exists).

switch: dir flash:
Directory of flash:/

2 -rwx 564       <date>               vlan.dat
3 -rwx 1914      <date>               private-config.text
5 drwx 192       <date>               c2960-lanbasek9-mz.122-58.SE2
6 -rwx 3096      <date>               multiple-fs
7 -rwx 2289      <date>               config.text

Now delete the vlan.dat and config.text.

switch: del flash:config.text
Are you sure you want to delete “flash:config.text” (y/n)?y
File “flash:config.text” deleted

switch: del flash:vlan.dat
Are you sure you want to delete “flash:vlan.dat” (y/n)?y
File “flash:vlan.dat” deleted

Now type boot, to reboot the switch. Once the switch is rebooted you will see the System Configuration Dialog, and will have the opportunity “to enter the initial configuration dialog”

Additional Resources:

http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/support/docs/switches/catalyst-2900-xl-series-switches/24328-156.html

http://www.cahilig.net/2014/04/14/how-reset-cisco-2960-switch-default-settings

http://notthenetwork.me/blog/2013/05/28/reset-a-cisco-2960-switch-to-factory-default-settings/

Reset HP ILO Via the Command Line

August 12, 2010December 4, 2014 / Christopher Paquin / 6 Comments

Its not unheard of that an HP ILO (Integrated Lights Out) can become sick and slow down to a crawl. When this occurs, a restart of the ILO is in order, which is easily accomplished via the ILO cli interface. Note that you need to make sure that that you have enabled ssh access in ilo.

The steps to reset an ilo via ssh are below.

</>hpiLO-> cd /map1
status=0
status_tag=COMMAND COMPLETED

</map1>hpiLO-> reset
status=0
status_tag=COMMAND COMPLETED
Resetting iLO.

CLI session stopped