Initial TOR switch configuration

Before the TOR switch can be managed by Ansible, some preliminary configuration needs to be performed by hand. By default, the network management port is configured via DHCP.

If the IP address of the switch is already know, an SSH connection can be opened directly to the switch; the serial console section below can be skipped.

When presented with a login prompt, log in as the admin user. The default password for the admin user can be found in the configuration manual of the device.

Serial console

To interrogate the switch to determine which network address it has been assigned when this information cannot be found by other means, connect a serial cable to the console port of the switch, log in, and retrieve the network configuration.

The console port is at the rear of the switch, below the management network interface:

Diagram showing the network and console ports.

The parameters for the serial connection is 115200 baudrate, 8 bits, no parity and 1 stop bit (115200 8n1).

When connected to the console and no text is seen, press ENTER to see whether a prompt appears.

IP address

To display the IP address of the management port on the switch, issue the show interface mgmt command. The output of the command can be piped through grep to only display the desired information.

OS10# show interface mgmt | grep Internet
Internet address is 10.0.0.1/24
OS10#

To manually assign an address, in the case where DHCP is not available, or when the DHCP server assigns an unsuitable address, the following commands can be used to temporarily assign an address to the management port:

Configure the management interface from CONFIGURATION mode.
```
interface mgmt 1/1/1
```
By default, DHCP client is enabled on the Management interface. Disable the DHCP client operations in INTERFACE mode.
```
no ip address dhcp
```
Configure an IPv4 or IPv6 address on the Management interface in INTERFACE mode.
```
ip address A.B.C.D/mask
ipv6 address A:B/prefix-length
```
Enable the Management interface in INTERFACE mode.
```
no shutdown
```

Configure the management interface with IP address 10.1.1.10, with a netmask of 255.255.255.0:

OS10# configure terminal
OS10(config)# interface mgmt 1/1/1
OS10(conf-if-ma-1/1/1)# no ip address dhcp
OS10(conf-if-ma-1/1/1)# ip address 10.1.1.10/24
OS10(conf-if-ma-1/1/1)# no shutdown
OS10# end

Note that this configuration is not persistent and the configuration will revert to the previous configuration when the switch is power-cycled.

To make this configuration persistent, issue the following command:

OS10# copy running-configuration startup-configuration

SSH public key authentication

It is also possible to configure SSH public-key authentication from the switch CLI. Issue the command system bash to launch a bash prompt and add the relevant SSH public-key to the ~/.ssh/authorized_keys file.

OS10# system bash
admin@OS10:/home/admin$ echo "ssh-ed25519 AA...XX a.n.other@example.com" >> ~/.ssh/authorized_keys