ed 5769 -summer -Hollingsworth/Roberts

Day 1 blog

Lyle had us working with setting up Alcatel switches , part of the data link layer .This is the first time I have ever been allowed or required to set up a device like this . Unfortunately our jurisdiction uses Cisco Layer 2 and 3 switches. We have also moved to Enterysis switches lately. I hope that what we have learned , can be extrapolated to our network .

What was very interesting was the use of a Serial connection to USB to our laptops for connecting to the ALcatel switch. As a network analyist, who would do this work on a daily basis, they would have all their computer all setup with the correct software , but we had to start from scratch. Luckily I have full admin rights to this laptop as we had to load software. We had to use a mini CD, once again, i have never used something like this , but the disc drive handled it fine.

This necessitated the use of specifing a COM port, In this case COM 33, even though the default on the laptop through Cool Term was COM 3. I have not had to worry about COM ports since setting up a modem about 10 yrs ago. At least we did not have to change Jumpers inside the Alacatel switch . We had to reinstall the drivers using the Device manager in Vista
The setup of the Cool Term was fairly straight forward , using the options , we had to specify the correct options, these turned out to be different from the default for CR-carrige l return and LM line mode. Once this was done and we could enter data, the default UN and PW was obtained from the Alcatel documentation.

Entering information software was once again a new experience using this new language .

We were able to enter the correct CLI Command Line Interface commands to
1) enter the correct IP address for our switch 192.168.10.254
we uses the CLI
ip interface vlan-1 address 192.168.10.254 vlan 1
when this was entered the swich went though its processing and we could see the correct ip
we used the CLI write memory to save our changes
2) verify the Ip was saved
this was done with the CLI copy working certified
3) reboot the switch to ensure the ip was in the Certified mode, as opposed to the working mode.
we then were able to reboot the switch, checking to make sure our Ip address was saved.

We connected our Layer 3 switch via a long ethernet cable to the main Layer 3 switch from our port 1 connection.
We then attached a computer to our layer 3 switch in any port , with a ethernet cable (making sure our wireless was off). We opened a browser to check and internet connection, as well check the ipconfig in cmd . Lyle confirmed we had the correct IP address for the main switch we had all connected our switches to, so success.
We did have to use a variety of alcatel resources which we have emailed to our instructor using APA format.