Accessing Switch Management Interfaces! Ep.6: Real-World Business Switch Network Build

configuration accessing switch management interfaces by time you're done here you will understand and configure switch management interfaces now at this point in the series we've talked a lot about switch design and switch connections and even gotten into some of the features that we need to have on our switch like link aggregation and spanning tree in order to design the network well and we realized really quick that we need to have a managed switch in order to deploy a lot of those features and so i have sitting before us three different managed switches over here on the left-hand side i've got an hp pro curve 2824 probably about a decade old at this point a ubiquity edge switch 8 we just unboxed that in the previous video and then a cisco sg 310p which is actually a fantastic 10 port poe switch and that's great we're going to use these switches to lead us on through the rest of the series but the first question that we should ask is how do i even get into these guys to be able to manage them i guess a simpler question would be how do i manage them let's do a quick visual inspection i'm looking at the hp pro curve 2824 right here i see all the ethernet ports right here up front and then over here on the right hand side we have our uplink ports now these are known as dual personality ports because you can either use the ethernet the copper or the fiber optic sfe and i'm saying fiber but really the personality of that port depends on what kind of sfp you slide in there now if i look at the back of this switch i'm not going to see much at all i see the ac adapter and then right here an rps input that's redundant power supply you can actually unscrew that and get dc voltage that comes right in there and just so you know a lot of the upper end switches have this i showed this to you on the edge switch that little guy over to the right of this guy this is really fantastic because you can buy a dc power supply essentially it's a big it actually is typically a rack mountable thing just like the switch that you can take ac power in and spit it out as dc power and connect it to a whole bunch of redundant power supply units so that way if one power supply dies the device continues to roll on but the big thing that i'm interested in is over here on the left hand side take a look at that that has a label underneath it that says console and you're gonna notice that recurring theme i'm sitting here on the edge switch eight and i see the eight ethernet ports but if i switch this guy around i can see right on the back i have that console port but it's different than the console port of the hp switch this console port is an rj45 connection versus the hp has a serial port this is on the back the hp was on the front finally i come over here to my cisco sg 310 port and i can see i've got the eight ethernet ports going across the top then two dual personality ports and again all that dual personality means is i can use either the ethernet or the sfp i can't use them both at the same time i can then take this switch and flip it around and see the same kind of system on the left hand side there i've got my serial interface it's actually a db9 interface so if i want to be able to use that console port i need an old school serial adapter so i've pointed out that console port three times now so it obviously has to be important for something what is the console port or what some people call the management interface of the switch what it is is your initial method to monitor and configure a device a lot of these switches when you pull them out of the box will not have an ip address that you can access with a computer or you'll walk into an environment where you see these switches mounted in the rack there's no documentation there's no ip address labels stuck on them but they're in production you can't interrupt their operation so that console port access is the only way into the device so your first goal is going to be how can i quickly not use the console connection the reason i say that is because the console connection first off is very slow it's designed for serial style connectivity which is the kind of connectivity we had decades ago for computers to interface with outside devices but the main thing about the console connection is it's right there as in you have to be right there you need to have a laptop and connect to that device sitting in the mdf or idf or wherever you're located most likely that's not going to be at the comfort of your office chair so we want to set our device up for day-to-day management via telnet ssh or http telnet and ssh really are the same thing in the sense that they're a command line interface to manage the device telnet is a non-secure but really easy way of managing it because you don't have to worry about generating encryption keys and using a management client that supports what's known as secure shell or ssh once the device is in production this is your secure way of managing that device it's very similar to http and https http is clear text anybody that intercepts that communication can see what's going on versus https which a lot of switches support as well which fully encrypts the communication between you and the device most switches nowadays support http management which is a graphic way of managing them and that's how we want to do our management whether it be from the command line or from a graphic interface the key is that we're not using that console connection on a day to day basis the console is just there for initial setup and disaster recovery everything's down i can't get to the switch what do i do i run into the it room and connect to that console port to see if i can see what's going on the console connection will often even allow you to see the switch booting up so if there's some kind of hardware failure with the switch you'll be able to see it on the boot process versus staring at it you're just watching blinking lights and not able to see what's really going on so when you pull a switch out of the box there are three styles of management interfaces that you'll encounter the handiest one is if it has a default ip address that means you don't have to use the console port because the switch comes pre-assigned with an ip address google is your best friend to find those things out i could type in cisco sg 300-10p default ip and you'll see whoever lifewire.com is has posted a list of all the default usernames and the default ip addresses that these things will come with out of the box now we hope that that's true and if you buy the switch brand new it should be take that switch lay it on the table connect a laptop to any one of the ports and assign the laptop an ip address that's in the same subnet or the same network as that default ip i'll just say 192.168.1.100 should do and then try and access that ip address in a web browser to get to the management interface then i don't even have to worry about a console connection but there's a lot of times the default ip address will fail you sometimes you might buy the equipment used sometimes it might be sitting on the desk and you simply forgot what ip address you assigned it sometimes it's sitting inside of that rack and long ago somebody changed the default ip address on that device like they should have and now you don't know what it is now you may be able to come up to that device and press the reset button with the paper clip which will reset it back to the factory default and that default ip address should come back but doing that causes you to lose the full configuration of the device so at that point you may have to resort to either the serial or what i call the rj45 serial the rg45 serial is that console port style i showed you on the back of the edge switch it still requires a computer with a serial port to connect it just doesn't use the old school db9 so what do you need to get started with a console connection really only three things first off i said get 10 of these things because i lose them all the time and you know why i lose them because no one else has them and people ask to borrow them and then i forget who i gave them to and they never give them back this is a usb to serial adapter you don't really have to get 10 because they run between 10 and 15 dollars a piece we'll call that our number one the second one you should already have which is a switch that you need to configure through the console port the last puzzle piece is a console cable hopefully one of those came with the switch when you bought it but even if it did those cables often end up like this thing lost and that's where ebay or amazon or some other online retailer becomes your friend first off if you go to google images and type in console cable you'll see two major types first is the serial to serial or db9 to db9 we would need this style for the hp or the cisco sg300 switch now be careful with that male to female thing need to look at your usb to serial adapter and what kind of end it has and look at the back of the switch and see what kind of end it has one of these connections will connect straight to your usb to serial the other will plug into the back of the switch make sure you have the male to female thing worked out correctly almost always the console port on the switch will be a male connection the other style of connection that you see is the teal cisco enterprise cable one side of this will be the db9 that's the one that you plug into your usb to serial adapter the other will be rj45 that goes into the switch the only switch on our table that will use that style will be the ubiquiti edge switch 8. but you'll find in the real world when you get to the cisco enterprise grade gear which i told you dominates the industry this is by far the most common connection type now i mentioned at the beginning that you will understand and configure switch management interfaces so here's what i want you to do just like the previous nugget we are in equipment gathering mode so i want you to gather the equipment that you need to access your switch management interface first off you probably need a usb to serial adapter best place to grab one of those is off of amazon you got a really reputable retailer along with enough customer reviews to make sure you don't buy something that just isn't gonna work i've seen a couple of these things for sale that are two dollars a piece and i've bought a few of those that are two dollar a piece and those are now the ones i give to people who ask me do you have a usb to serial adapter and i smile and hand them my two dollar one and say this is the only one i've got and say give this a whirl i know it's got some driver issues but if you can figure that out all yours those poor souls and over here i have the console cable either the typical teal cisco branded console cable a lot of people call this a rollover cable because cisco literally rolls these eight individual wires over as it comes to the serial connection or this style which connects to the switches with the db9 connection built straight into the switch and of course you need to have some kind of laptop now this will assemble all the equipment that you need but i still need to show you how to set up the software which is essentially a terminal program to be able to communicate with that management interface that's going to come in the upcoming nuggets i'm going to do one nugget per switch brand to make sure you are ready to rock i hope this has been informative for you and i'd like to thank you for viewing you

Channel: Viatto

Views: 8,318

Keywords: Ubiquiti Switch, Cisco Switch, network install, network switch, Jeremy Cioara, Business switch network, real world install, switch install, patch panel install, real world, installation, Real world install, cable management, fiber cabling, Fiber Cable, CCNA, fiber, fiber types, information technology (industry), information technology, it, tech, networking, it jobs, it fundamentals, how to, learn IT, networking tutorial for beginners, home network, Keeping IT Simple

Id: TR2qZHPEa4g

Length: 10min 58sec (658 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 29 2020