homelab cisco c9620x
I've never used cisco gear before. It's always been out of my price range and/or need. But I found myself wanting to get rid of the security box hooked up to our home cameras because it kept trying to contact alibaba.
With the camera reconfigured for DHCP I found they were accessible from any computer on my home network - which meant I could use Frigate to monitor camera feeds instead of the proprietary stuff from Dahua.
I had a problem - all these cameras use Power-over-Ethernet, PoE. My poe switch had only 5 ports. That was not enough for all the devices. I needed a bigger PoE switch.
I discovered that the cheapest TP-Link poe switch with enough ports would cost around $139 Australian. That was my benchmark and I found myself at a used networking equipment website.
There I found a Cisco switch with 24 poe ports. Far more than I think I'll ever need (but never say never). It was only $120 with postage. That's a bargain I was willing to take a gamble on.
Knowing nothing about how cisco equipment operates I purchased and impatiently waited over Christmas/New Years for it to arrived. Today it arrived.
Whoever owned it before had removed the webUI and that meant using the CLI only. I really don't know my way around cisco gear well enough for that so I decided it was time for a factory reset.
Little did I know a factory reset does not reset you back to a basic configuration. It wipes the entire flash drive. The only software you have is the boot utility.
It was at this time I knew I had fucked up. First step was to get the console working. I mistook the RJ-45 console port as something that would be networked. It was not. The RJ-45 connects to a serial port. I do not have a serial port. Who has serial ports anymore?
There was also a USB console port. Score. I went to our households box of cables and found a nice long mini USB port cable and plugged it in. I had console access and I was able to confirm that I had indeed deleted everything.
That was the morning. The next attempt was lunch time when I began trying to restore the IOS image on to the device using 'xmodem recovery'. This was, apparently, the right thing to do. But it didn't work. I found a forum post saying "Oh yeah that doesn't work over the USB console don't even bother. Use a USB thumb drive instead."
Grr. Okay, so I went and grabbed my partners stash of old USB sticks and tried one out. Errors. Tried another. Errors. Forums told me it had to be FAT-16 formatted. So I did that. More errors. More forums told me there were only 3 Cisco brands of USB that would work.
Grrr. Okay. What I needed, then, was a real serial port. I could either buy a serial PCIe and stick that in my machine - or take a gamble on a USB serial port. Yes, USB again. I was fearing the worst that xmodem wouldn't work function.
A quick trip to jaycar and I'm back home. Plug it in. Fix the Baud rate. Start xmodem and... the file begins to transfer. It's been a long time since I've watched a download run at 115200 baud speed. Oof. 17 minutes later the firmware was on the device and I rebooted it.
That got me back in to a slightly working state. Which also meant the fans of the switch quieted down to a reasonable decibel. Next up was transferring the rest of the firmware across. Xmodem transfer is too slow for that, so I decided to set up FTP. I found a simple ftp server for my PC and gave both the switch and my PC static IP addresses so they could talk.
The transfer was slow primarily because the flash disk in the switch was slow. Once I got it on there I was finally able to reboot. Uh oh, the reboot button doesn't work. More forum hunting and I had to erase the startup config. Finally, a reboot, and I could get in to the express setup and it actually worked.
It's evening now and I've moved the switch downstairs in other the homelab, removed the spyware security box, and plugged everything in to the new poe cisco switch. It worked instantly. Frigate can see the cameras. Next on the todo list will be to get object detection working so that it can auto-record mail deliveries and trespassers.
A frustrating but nice step forward. As a bonus the homelab is quieter down there, we're drawing at least 20watts less -and- the temperature of the gateway has gone down too. Wins all around.
My first exploration of Cisco. It's powerful. Buy second hand. The only issue with it are some scratches on its lid. It's going in a rack - I'll never see those scratches.
