Intel 550T manual Use of the Console Port

C H A P T E R 7 Console Port Use and Troubleshooting

	Use of the Console Port
Purpose of Console Port	If you lose contact with the switch and the Recovery Manager in Intel
	Device View or Local Management over the LAN cannot contact it,
	then the following is possible via the Console port on the front of the
	switch.
Local Management	During normal operation (the switch is running and the Status LED is
	green) the Console port will give access to a menu, identical to the
	one accessible via a telnet connection to the switch. The menu allows
	configuration of basic parameters, extensive monitoring, flash opera-
	tions, reset of the switch etc.
Maintenance Mode	If the switch is failing for some reason (System LED goes red), and
	cannot start correctly after a reset, this may be caused by either hard-
	ware failure, corruption of the software, or corruption of the switch
	configuration. To allow recovery from such a situation when the Re-
	covery Manager of Intel Device View cannot be applied, the mainte-
	nance mode is provided. In the following, various problems are
	described as well as the way they are solved using maintenance mode.
	In the next section it is explained how to start and use the mainte-
	nance mode.
	Note Loading software to the switch in Maintenance Mode
	should only be done as a last resort, the reason being that
	the software and configuration are already resident in the
	flash memory is overwritten and lost.
Switch Software	The software for the switch (including a default configuration) re-
	sides in the switch’s flash memory. A backup of the software is pro-
	vided on the CD delivered with the switch, and the newest software
	versions may be downloaded via the Internet. The software files may
	be used for restoring or upgrading the switch software.
Restoring Software	The switch software may be restored/downloaded from a TFTP serv-
	er, if the current software in flash memory has been corrupted. The
	TFTP and BOOTP commands may both be used to accomplish this.
	For the TFTP command an external TFTP server with the software
	must be present on the network. For the BOOTP command a BOOTP/
	TFTP server (also often referred to as a boot server) must be present.

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