How To Setup a Cisco Switch from SCRATCH, Chapter 3:

Chapter 3

Express Setup

First time users will find this useful to get up and running quickly and hassle free.

So now you took your serial cable from chapter 2 got it hooked into your switch and pc or notebook and your ready to go. Now after you use hyper terminal or PuTTY to access your switch via COM port you will most likely be greeted with a command prompted "Wizard" (depending how old your switch is) this is not a bad way to jump start your switch quickly to get it barebones settings and working.

The setup will probably look like the picture below:

Click picture to Enlarge

Our first look at the cisco IOS

Once you click the image you can see that I went ahead and filled out most the settings as they should be. Let me cover the setup and answers in depth.

0) If you are NOT prompted with this express setup and want to try loading it here is how..
Type
Switch> enable
Then type
Switch#> setup
Simple eh?? :)

1) Would you like to continue with the setup dialog? yes
This is obviously telling the switch you want to use the express setup wizard to continue.
For advance users you can click "NO" if you prefer to everything manual and by hand, though I do not recommend that if you are reading this :P



2) Enter IP Address: 192.168.X.X
This is the IP you want to assign your switch, this is extremely helpful so in the future you can access the switch without having to use the serial cable. You can simple use Telnet or PuTTY. Since this is a switch and not a router the IP address is not too important of what you choose. If your not sure of your IP range just do an IPconfig.



3) Enter IP NETMASK: 255.255.255.0
This is the Subnet mask of your network... for most home or small networks you will use 255.255.255.0... if your not sure of your subnet just do an IPconfig.



4) Would you like to enter a Default Gateway Address: YES
Yes this is the IP of your router AKA gateway... This is how your switch will route traffic.. Meaning.. If you are plugged into your switch and your computer sends a request to go out on the Internet the switch will attempt to send that request to the Gateway (router), Therefore if the switch does not know where your router (gateway) is you won't be getting out anytime soon ;)~~~

Most gateways are .1 or sometimes .254

Your gateway if "Linksys" Router: 192.168.1.1
Your gateway if "Dlink" Router: 192.168.0.1
Your gateway if "Netgear" Router: 192.168.0.1


5) Enter Host name: Home-SW-1
This is the name you want to give your router, this is not too important in less you are on a bigger network and have a proper naming scheme to track your equipment. Feel free to put whatever you want... Call it Douche bag, Your going to access your switch via IP anyhow.



6) Enter Enable secret: *********
This is your password to access configuration items inside your switch.. Make this password something you will not forget. it can be whatever you want...

DO NOT MAKE THIS PASSWORD "cisco"

"cisco" is the default password for most the cisco's equipment making it this would be a stupid idea :P~



7) Would you like to configure a telnet password: YES
Telnet is how you will access your switch in the future also other people could access your switch threw telnet so you better put a password.



8) Enter your telnet password: ********
Some people will tell you not to make it the same password as your enable password but I keep my enable and telnet password the same to make life easier.

If you get prompted that you can not use the same password twice just retype your same password again (yes a second time even though it said NO), it will go threw this time and allow you to use the same password!! Vola !! stupid software is not going to tell us what to do!!!




9) Would you like to enable as a cluster command switch: NO
Switches in cluster use the switch clustering so that you can configure and troubleshoot a group of different cisco switch's through a single IP address. This could be helpful but not in our situation.




10) Use this Configuration?: YES

This will give you a brief overview of the setup and settings we picked. Cisco understands you are not like them - meaning you are not perfect, so they allow you a chance to go back and make some changes. Confirm everything is OK then click YES!!!! If not click NO and redo the setup, LOSER!!! ;)



DONE!! - You should now be able to access your switch via TELNET and IP address. You should also be able to access your network and internet now by being plugged in to your switch.



Next chapter we go more in depth setup, configuration and IOS commands.

Coming soon Chapter 4

First Post!!!

Hi, This is my new IT Tech Blog.. This blog is going to contain helpful information related to Information Technology, So anything along the lines of networking, software and hardware.



A little about myself.

I am 28 Year old male working in the HEALTH CARE industry. The company I work for owns a Hospital in Long Beach CA also we own various clinics, pharmacy's, private doctor offices and of course our business offices. This being said Me and our team are responsible for roughly 1500 users...

A little about my everyday environment.

We have a WAN connected with Telepacific between our various sites. We have 2 main outs for our Internet split - one is threw Charter and the other is going threw TPAC as well.

We have mostly Windows XP machines for the end users, with a couple windows 2000 machines here and there, NO vista yet for the end users but some of the more PC sabby people have it (with no problems).

All of our routers are Cisco routers now and about 85% of our switches are also cisco. We still have some that have not been replaced yet..

Recently just migrated to Cisco VoIP solution at most of our main sites, We went from an older NORTEL system over to Cisco VoIP and rolled out over 500 IP phones in a week!!! It was a huge project and finally over, Thus we use Cisco Call Manager and Cisco Unity for voicemail.
Also 2 of our sites are using SHORTEL VoIP as an Alternate solution.

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My goal

To help anyone who needs help or even get some interesting informative feed back on things I post on here. So the beginners can feel free to learn and the advanced people can feel free to post their experience or what their understand may be.