Extreme 450a config recovery

[rod_barton]

Hi We have several 450a switches in one of our solutions and have had a few failures recently, is it possible to recover a configuration file from a failed switch if it only bootd to the BootRom prompt ?

[FredrikB]

Thanks, CWurm, always good to know!

Rod, are you seeing ECC memory errors prior to the breakdowns? They normally read: “HAL.Sys: CPU/L2 Memory ECC Counters have incremented.” If you’re not monitoring for these, it may be worth doing so. A customer uses the syslogs to predict failures and replaces switches proactively when they see this. In X450e, it may be a real concern depending on the manufacturing batch, but we see it on some of the few remaining X450a’s as well. These logs are stored in NVRAM storage, so they survive most failures and are readable in the switch logs unless the switch has been totally reset.

/Fredrik

[CWurm]

Hi FredrikB, the file system of partition 7 is JFFS2. If you manually mount it with specifying that file system you can also access the configuration directly from the CF card.

[FredrikB]

The cause for the failure to boot may or may not be the RTC battery. If it is, then you’ll see this happening over and over again on the same switch if powered down for more than perhaps one hour. The RTC (clock) battery of the X450a is replaceable. It’s a yellow “box”, some 14 x 21 mm in size that sits on the circuit board holding the management port and the CF card. Reading the config from the CF it may not be that straight forward. In the CF I have hare, from an X450a, partition 7 is the only one with the text “enable” matching and looking at the binary/ascii contents it seems that the config is there, but the partition is of type 13, which is unknown to Linux. Surely there are ways to mount those in Linux but I don’t have a method for doing that here and now. Putting the CF in a good X450a would enable you to extract the files for sure.

[Necheporenko__N · Accepted solution]

Hello rod.barton,

try the following from BootRom→ 

boot 3 

linux

cd /config

cat <config’s name> ### copy xml to a text file and save as <name.cfg>

After all just do power reboot

Example:

BootRom > boot 3

Loading EXOS Diagnostics ... 

Running Image ...

SummitX Diagnostics Mode Enabled, Starting Diagnostics....

11
Slot 1
Motherboard CPLD Revision: 2

Summit(BCM) Manufacturing Diagnostics (00.00.00.09)
slot1>linux
cd /config
ls 
primary.cfg
vmt
cat primary.cfg
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="exos_config_display.xsl"?>
<xos-configuration version="15.3.5.2" date="Tue Dec 17 06:12:51 2019" creator="admin" checksum="0" platform="X450a-24t">
<xos-module-aaa version="3.0.0.3">
<radius_service><server_set>1</server_set><type>0</type><timeOut>3</timeOut><enable>0</enable></radius_service>
<radius_service><server_set>1</server_set><type>1</type><timeOut>3</timeOut><enable>0</enable></radius_service>
<radius_service><server_set>2</server_set><type>0</type><timeOut>3</timeOut><enable>0</enable></radius_service>

Also as all X450a are not under warranty now you may try to remove CompactFlash card from affected switches and copy config via CF card reader.

Best Regards,

Nikolay