As part of my ACM cluster creation obsession, I wanted to make the Cisco 2900XL switches we have autoconfigure. I’m not terribly familiar with how these switches operate and, rather than reconfigure all of them at once, I’d much rather be able to reboot (reload, in cisco parlence) them and have them come up with my new, clean config.
Fortunately for me, Cisco thought of a situation like this when building the software for these switches. According to this page from their instruction manual, if a switch boots and doesn’t have an in-flash configuration file, it will DHCP/BOOTP for a network address, then attempt to TFTP one of several files - network-confg, cisconet.cfg, router-confg or ciscortr.cfg.
In my case, I’m running this next to xCat, so I already have a TFTP and DHCP servers running. Furthermore, my switch was already set up in xCat to get a static address. So all I really needed to do was put in the configuration file. But how to generate …