Tag Archives: dell

Dell N2248-ON firmware restore from ONIE Recovery

I have been working a lot with the Dell N-series over last few years, and now the N2248-ON which can run OS10 as well as the default OS6. We upgraded firmware to the latest 6.6.3.10 and all seemed to go well. Somehow it did not and hosed both primary/secondary firmware. The device was boot looping – the only option was to drop into ONIE Recovery and re-install the firmware. Here are the steps I used:

The ONIE recovery area runs a version of Linux. First check out your NIC to make sure it finds it:

ONIE:/ # ifconfig
eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 8C:47:BE:97:B5:0F
inet6 addr: fe80::8e47:beff:fe97:b50f/64 Scope:Link
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:67 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:13 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
RX bytes:6904 (6.7 KiB) TX bytes:1198 (1.1 KiB)
Memory:dfe00000-dfe7ffff

Great! Eth0 is found, but of course link status is down. Eth0 is the out of band management interface. We should be able to set an IP address on the interface and install firmware VIA TFTP or USB.

First I will setup and IP that can communicate with my laptop :

ifconfig eth0 192.168.1.100 netmask 255.255.255.0

ONIE:/ # ifconfig
eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 8C:47:BE:97:B5:0F
inet addr:192.168.1.100 Bcast:192.168.1.255 Mask:255.255.255.0
inet6 addr: fe80::8e47:beff:fe97:b50f/64 Scope:Link
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:108 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:49 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
RX bytes:10874 (10.6 KiB) TX bytes:7658 (7.4 KiB)
Memory:dfe00000-dfe7ffff

Perfect! My laptop is 192.168.1.99 – and connected directly to the out of band MGMT port.

Next we will TFTP the file up. This file is located in the software archive you download from Dell – Its located in the
“Otherfiles” folder. In this case the file name is onie-installer-x86_64-dellemc_n22xx_6.6.3.10. Next I put this on my TFTP server and we can start the install.

First lets turn off the ONIE-Discovery attempts with the onie-stop command.

Now lets upgrade – Run:

onie-nos-install tftp://192.168.1.99/onie-installer-x86_64-dellemc_n22x
x_6.6.3.10

The onie-nos-install will install the OS back to the device. The firmware took a few minutes to install, with about 4 reboots I think – it was all automatic.

Now lets see if the switch was updated with the “show version” command.

All is good!

Dell OS10- Sflow setup

These commands should be all that is needed to setup Sflow on OS10. In this example these commands used to setup Sflow on a Dell S4128F-ON running 10.4.2.0.226. I am using PRTG as a collector.

config t
sflow enable
sflow sample-rate 4096
sflow source-interface vlan5
sflow collector 10.10.5.152 agent-addr 10.10.5.246 2050

PRTG IP is 10.10.5.152 – my switch Vlan 5 IP is 10.10.5.246.

Then you have to specify the physical interfaces you want to send Sflow traffic.

config t
int eth 1/1/1
sflow enable

That should get flows going. You can confirm that by running the following command:

S4128-1# show sflow
sFlow services are enabled
Management Interface sFlow services are disabled
Global default sampling rate: 4096
Global default counter polling interval: 30
Global default extended maximum header size: 128 bytes
Global extended information enabled: none
1 collector(s) configured
Collector IP addr:10.10.5.152 Agent IP addr:10.10.5.246 UDP port:2050 VRF:Defaul t
7232 UDP packets exported
0 UDP packets dropped
39259 sFlow samples collected

 

 

Dell FX2 console to internal switches

The Dell FX2 is a pretty awesome piece of hardware. I mostly only work on it from the networking side.

From the CMC you can console to each of your switch modules. I had a hard time finding documentation on the very simple command to do this. From doing a quick ? and scanning through each command I found “Connect” Pretty fast, and knew that would be it …. but connect to what?

I finally found from searching a different help command that you can do

Connect switch-1

or

connect switch-2

This will allow you to access each of your switches from the CMC. Check the below screenshot out.

connect-1

Enabling SSH on Dell Powerconnect 5000/6000/7000

No one is probably trying to even do this anymore due to the new Dell switching lines, but thought I would see if I could help. I had this issue the other day, and it took a good bit of googlefu before I could find my answer .

The problem I had was getting SSH enabled on a Dell PowerConnect 7048P. I created my user/passwords , and then generated my certificate, and then enabled the SSH server.. I got this error

PC-7048(config)#crypto key generate rsa

RSA key generation started, this may take a few minutes……..
RSA key generation complete.

PC-7048(config)#

PC-7048(config)#ip ssh server

SSH could not be enabled.

Hmmm… Why is that, all of my needed components are there, so why is it not working. The reason is there is no Cert to be used by SSH. These models use the Digital signature Algorithm (DSA) Certificate instead of the RSA cert. SO we need to create the DSA Cert.

PC-7048(config)#crypto key generate dsa

DSA key generation started, this may take a few minutes………………….
DSA key generation complete.

PC-7048(config)#ip ssh ser

No error!! and it works just fine.

Good reading for the comparison of RSA vs DSA: http://security.stackexchange.com/questions/5096/rsa-vs-dsa-for-ssh-authentication-keys