So if you have ever inadvertently locked yourself out of your Extreme switch I am going to give you a quick guide on getting back in. Actually this is really not a quick process at all.

***DISCLAIMER***
THIS PROCEDURE WILL ERASE THE ALL CONFIGURATION DATA ON YOUR SWITCH.

This is not a big problem if you make regular backups, also this procedure does not completley wipe the entire switch, so any configs stored in the flash memory are still there.

 You will need the following items to complete this procedure:

• Serial Cable
• TFTP Server - SolarWinds TFTP Server  is FREE
• Config files
• Ethernet cable

1. Connect your laptop or computer via Serial cable to the Console port of the switch. 
2. Reboot the switch
3. Watch the console and enter the bootrom by holding the spacebar down.
4. At the prompt type: “config none” and hit enter.
5. Type “reboot” followed by enter.
6. Let the switch boot normally. Once the switch is booted you can login using the default login information.

At this point you are now able to login to the switch but there is no configuration on it so there are two options for proceeding from here. A. copy a backed up config already on the switch and use it. B. upload a backed up config from a file on your laptop and use it.

Tags: Extreme Networks, Networking, passwords, security, tutorial

So unfortunately I have been so busy it has been hard to post lately, however I am working to reprioritize so I will be able to post more often. The problem of the week up for discussion today is the DNS problems I have been experiencing today. A bit of background will help make this whole situation a little easier to understand. So my domain name had two listed name servers, one at my hosting company and the other living on my dedicated server at the hosting company. This was working okay, or so it seemed but it just really bothered me when my domain name didn’t pass the tests at DNSStuff.com . I have complete control over the DNS records living on my dedicated server. I can even create records for my public IP addresses that come into the building, which are different than my IP addresses at my hosting provider. The problem lies in the fact that I could only modify DNS records at my host for IP addresses that are owned by the hosting the company. The other problem here was that I had no way to control which name server was the primary, which serial number is correct, or which name server is authoritative.So what is the solution to this problem you ask? Well for starters I brought up another Linux box hosted locally in my own data center. After this I installed Bind 9 and configured it to host the master records for my domain and my reverse IP zones. To set this up I followed the steps over at HowToForge.com. This tutorial is very good and goes into just the right amount of detail to get everything up and running once Bind is installed. Once all the setup was finished on my primary server I setup the secondary server, this is my dedicated server at my hosting company. The secondary server is running the Plesk Control Panel, so I went in and switched the DNS settings for the domain in Plesk to be secondary. This worked initially but the file quit receiving zone updates from the master. So what I ended up doing was modifying the named.conf of the secondary server following the instructions at the aforementioned tutorial. I made the zone file have a new name in the named.conf such as “bak.domain.com”. Once this was finished and I restarted the Bind service the zone was updated successfully from the master. So granted this is a fairly simple task it is one that has been really bothering me for a while and now I am able to pass all the tests except one at dnsstuff.com. (Btw, the failing test is Single Point of Failure, I get a warning, but word on the forums is that this test is broken) 

Tags: dns, Networking, security, tutorial