mechanika.org

Things I’ve learned today

So today I learned a few things.

First and most importantly, never ever format a switch’s flash memory without making sure there is an IOS image avaialable somewhere.

Second, using a Mac works great for a lot of things, however xmodem file transfer isn’t one of them.

After wiping one of my switches in order to complete the first lab in the BCMSN lab portfolio, I figured hey I’ll get a bit a head and wipeout everything in the flash memory (unfortunately this included the IOS). So to make a long story short, OS X works great for console for almost everything, except i couldn’t figure out how to xmodem a copy of the IOS up to the switch. So after a bit of digging, I found something i hadn’t heard or seen since my days of MacOS 7.0, Zterm. I downloaded zterm and after a minute figuring out how to send the file I’m slowly loading a new IOS.