[rescue] How to "find" Cisco 3620?

Curtis H. Wilbar Jr. rescue at hawkmountain.net
Sun Nov 9 10:04:03 CST 2003


On Sun, 2003-11-09 at 07:12, Eric Webb wrote:
> I have a 3620 here that seems to boot and run, but the console port is fudged.  
> I see output from the unit, but it's garbled.  I've tried every combination 
> of baud rate, stop, data, parity known to man, and I've even tried resetting 
> NVRAM (which is supposed to default the comm parameters as well).  At one 
> point in time, I was able to "sync" up with it and got intelligible output, 
> but not since.

Ouch... not fun.

Should default to 9600-n-8-1.

I don't think I've ever seen anyone set one to something different.

> 
> So, without a console port, how else do you get into one of these things?  
> Assuming it had an ethernet NIC, I could probably write a script to ping it.. 
> (this would be time-consuming, though, and would require continuously 
> changing subnets on the source machine).  Any suggestions on how I should 
> attempt to access it?   ICMP ping?  SNMP port?

Well, w/o the console port, your probably a bit hosed.  If you had 
access to another 3620 and the particular flash where the config is
stored is on a removable item (I've never tried this so I don't even
know if the flash where the config is stored is on a removable part)
then you could program using one 3620 and move the part into the one
with the bad console port.

> 
> Once I reset NVRAM, do the NICs have a default IP address assigned to them at 
> all?

the default in all the IOS versions I've worked with is to leave the
ethernet unconfigured.

> 
> I'm convinced that there's a bad component on the board that's goofing up the 
> console serial link.  Is there any hope of finding schematics?

Schematics ! yeah right.... I doubt even their best contracted support
enterprise customer could request those to a friendly employee of Cisco
on a good day.... I've never seen any Cisco schematics.

If you don't get anywhere with it, I have a 3620, and could use a parts
3620 for the power supply, fans, etc (I've got one fan out in mine
currently.... screams like a banshee if I hadn't disconnected it :-) ).

I don't know if a problem I have intermittently with mine is a 3620
thing... or just my unit... but every 3-4 months mine would toast the
internal flash SIMM where the IOS resides.  Sometimes I'd be able to
reformat the flash SIMM and reload an IOS... two times I wasn't even
able to do that.  I got fed up with it and put in a PCMCIA flash card
and removed the internal flash SIMM altogether.... now it never fails.
Someone else told me once they heard of 3620s doing this... anyone else
ever seen that behavior ?

So, again, if you don't get anywhere with it, contact me... I can't
afford Cisco support, so having spare parts is my support plan :-)
(and I currently don't have any spare parts for this).

-- Curt

> 
> 
> Eric
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