IT Leadership: Installing an IP Address on a Switch

Wow, Geek heaven! The day began with a discussion on switches. Many of us were intrigued comparing Cisco, DLink, and Alcatel brand switches. DLink, my division protocol, was quickly dismissed. While economical(consumer level) it apparently does not stand the test of time nor reliability. Alcatel(enterprise level) was the Layer 2 switch we were going to be working with. What I learned today, is that the Alcatel switches have two operating systems, which means that they never fail in the event of a power fluctuation. (The two operating systems was to later cause John, my class partner, and I frustration in saving our VLAN address). I do admit to seeing the DLink switches fail (more than once). Needless to say, I found the discussion fascinating.

I actually looked forward to the hands-on portion of our learning today. It has been two years since I have had the opportunity to troubleshoot hardware issues.
My partner, John and I quickly installed the Cool Term for Windows software (no glitches). This software was to be the interface that allowed us to install our VLAN address.

Next we installed the serial to USB bridge. This adapter allowed us to connect our laptops (via USB) to the Serial port on the router. The laptop we were using was Vista. Vista did give us difficulty in installing the proper updated driver for this adapter. We were forced to use some of our "old skills" and troubleshoot using the device manager found in the Control Panel.

Once our driver was properly installed, we went to our software and tried to connect to the router. This looked to be as simple as pressing the Connect button. Nothing is rarely as simply as it initially looks. We were told that what we should see is a login prompt. We saw several login prompts. It appeared we had an echo. Through the discovery method, we found our solution.






When we explored the options button, we found that the software was recognizing Com Port 3 and we needed it to recognize 33. This was a quick fix. We also changed the Terminal Mode to Line. This buffering made it much more efficient to operate.

I hadn't seen the CR acronym used since my high school days taking typing class. That was a step back in time. We chose to keep the
key emulation at CR & LF (Line Feed). This worked and we were now ready to log in.

We needed to reference our Alcatel documentation to obtain the default username and password. The username was admin (a pretty standard choice) and the password was switch.

Wow, we were finally in, and all we now needed to do was enter our VLAN address. Although it sounds simple, and we were elated with our progress at this point, we were soon to be temporarily frustrated. A quick reference to the CLI Command document showed us that we needed to enter the command ip interface vlan -1 address 192.168.10.254 (this was the address we were assigned.) The software does not provide an authentication. The lack of error messages made us assume we had registered this VLAN address but one should never make assumptions. We wanted to verify. We used the command show ip interface to verify our address. We learned these commands well because we repeated these steps in getting our router to hold this address.

I began my blog by toting the virtues of the Alcatel router and its backup operating system in the event of a power failure. However, this dual operating system meant that our new VLAN configuration needed to be written to both systems. An aha moment for John and I. Our next step needed to be write memory. This command saved the configuration in our working copy. We next used the copy working certified to ensure that the certified version held the configuration. As a double measure we also used copy certified working. When we reloaded (reload=reboot) this time our router held our address. Yeah!

To complete our project we connected a CAT 5 cable to the Layer 3 router through Port 1. We verified that we were receiving an IP address by connecting our laptop to our router and doing an IPconfig command. We were in business.


How will our experiences today help us in the realm of IT Leadership? It took John and I about one and a half hours to accomplish what a trained technician should be able to accomplish in about 15 minutes. The documentation was key. The information was readily available online and it was a matter of reading and following things through sequentially. Trying to take shortcuts resulted in failure. Always double-check, its all in the details.