Alcatel Unleashed

Hello everybody,

I have limited experience with network equipment (mostly with SME networks) and when I got a chance to get a second-hand "professional" switch, I thought I should try to expand my comfort zone a bit...

So, here I have a not quite brand-new OmniSwitch 6400 on my desk – supposedly reset to facory defaults – and I think it might be a nice summer project to set it up for my home network.

Unfortunately, there is not much information available from the A-L web site – though I could already find the "Network Configuration Guide" (2017) and the "Getting Started Guide" (2008).

Before I dive into this – is there any other good ressource I would need? Is there any (free) management software or other manuals that are absolute must-haves?

Any help would be appreciated

All the best

/sascha

Hello again,

just to document everything here in case others are finding this forum with similar questions.

Firstly, of course, there was the challenge of getting into the serial console – the problem of the missing cable seems to be pretty universal (and honestly, I pretty much question the wisdom of the manufacturer to use a proprietory connector in this case). Worse yet, there seem to be multiple different wirings documented, so it was a bit of guesswork to find the right one.

My solution was a combination of a USB-to-Serial adapter, a serial terminal-block adapter and an old Ethernet cable that had one side broken anyways. Here's how that looks like (a bit hotch-potch, I know, but it works
I wired it as follows:

Serial/terminal - RJ45 connector
1 — 
2 — 6
3 — 3
4 — 2
5 — 4
6 — 7
7 — 1
8 — 8
9 — 

I used PuTTY with the usual serial port settings (9600 baud, 8/1 bits, no parity, XON/XOFF) and got greeted with what seemed an endless list of boot messages. Success!

When prompted I logged in with the default user name ("admin") and password ("switch") and hooray!

The following was all from the "OmniSwitch 6400 Series Getting Started Guide". I just repeat it here because it is already difficult to find this document and this here may stay online for longer...

Firstly, give that switch an IP address, so I can log in via telnet or via the web interface rather than that pesky serial cable...
Secondly, activate remote access services on the switch; Simply all of them, I can remove the unneeded ones later:
High time to set a new, more secure password:
After setting a new password, I was asked to re-authenticate but the console accepted neither the new nor the old password at first. Strange ... I could however log in via the web interface and that accepted the new password. Also, when I connected again to serial a few minutes later, I could in fact log in with the new passport, so that seems to be a little glitchy. Doesn't matter, it's not something I'll do very often...

I changed all the other settings (time zone, date, location, etc.) in the web interface. Much easier than typing commands...

À propos date: I couldn't find a setting for configuring an NTP server... did I miss something?

In any case, it seems to work. Cool!