OmniSwitch 6400, getting started

[saschaleib]

Hello everybody,

I have limited experience with network equipment (mostly with SME networks) and when I got a chance to get a second-hand "professional" switch, I thought I should try to expand my comfort zone a bit...

So, here I have a not quite brand-new OmniSwitch 6400 on my desk – supposedly reset to facory defaults – and I think it might be a nice summer project to set it up for my home network.

Unfortunately, there is not much information available from the A-L web site – though I could already find the "Network Configuration Guide" (2017) and the "Getting Started Guide" (2008).

Before I dive into this – is there any other good ressource I would need? Is there any (free) management software or other manuals that are absolute must-haves?

Any help would be appreciated

All the best

/sascha

[saschaleib]

Hello again,

just to document everything here in case others are finding this forum with similar questions.

Firstly, of course, there was the challenge of getting into the serial console – the problem of the missing cable seems to be pretty universal (and honestly, I pretty much question the wisdom of the manufacturer to use a proprietory connector in this case). Worse yet, there seem to be multiple different wirings documented, so it was a bit of guesswork to find the right one.

My solution was a combination of a USB-to-Serial adapter, a serial terminal-block adapter and an old Ethernet cable that had one side broken anyways. Here's how that looks like (a bit hotch-potch, I know, but it works

Serial adapter.jpg

I wired it as follows:

Serial/terminal - RJ45 connector
1 — 
2 — 6
3 — 3
4 — 2
5 — 4
6 — 7
7 — 1
8 — 8
9 — 

I used PuTTY with the usual serial port settings (9600 baud, 8/1 bits, no parity, XON/XOFF) and got greeted with what seemed an endless list of boot messages. Success!

When prompted I logged in with the default user name ("admin") and password ("switch") and hooray!

The following was all from the "OmniSwitch 6400 Series Getting Started Guide". I just repeat it here because it is already difficult to find this document and this here may stay online for longer...

Firstly, give that switch an IP address, so I can log in via telnet or via the web interface rather than that pesky serial cable...

Code: Select all

ip interface my_vlan address 192.168.1.10 vlan 1

Secondly, activate remote access services on the switch; Simply all of them, I can remove the unneeded ones later:

Code: Select all

aaa authentication default local

High time to set a new, more secure password:

Code: Select all

password

After setting a new password, I was asked to re-authenticate but the console accepted neither the new nor the old password at first. Strange ... I could however log in via the web interface and that accepted the new password. Also, when I connected again to serial a few minutes later, I could in fact log in with the new passport, so that seems to be a little glitchy. Doesn't matter, it's not something I'll do very often...

I changed all the other settings (time zone, date, location, etc.) in the web interface. Much easier than typing commands...

À propos date: I couldn't find a setting for configuring an NTP server... did I miss something?

In any case, it seems to work. Cool!