Beware of colleagues bearing gifts

Sometimes an Architect has to get out of their lofty white towers and get their hands dirty with some real work, and that has been my lot over the last few weeks.

A colleague being helpful and resourceful managed to obtain a couple of SAN switches and some disk storage that we could use in the test lab, but by the time i got involved, couldn't remember anything about where they were from or what any of the passwords were.

So time to investigate, The switches were labelled with HP StorageWorks SAN Switch 2/16V which in reality are just rebadged Brocade 3850. So after a couple of attempts at finding a reset button (no such luck) I connected to the serial port and pulled the power to force a reboot. On booting you are given a option to boot into a PROM state where I found that the recovery password had not been set (they had now) and a few Linux type commands

printenv

This produced the PROM environment settings, confirming the memory OS loader location.

boot MEM()0xF00000 -s

Manually starting the OS from the memory location shown before

mount -o remount,rw,noatime /

mount /dev/hda2 /mnt

/sbin/passwddefault

This reset all the built in accounts to there factory defaults

reboot -f

Rebooted the switch then we were able to get into the Fabric OS  using the default root account and password (fibranne - if you have the same switches as me or google is your friend)

So finally we have 2 working switches all be it with old versions of the Firmware so more hands on work for me as we go through the upgrade processes, hope the lab is worth it when it is done.