What? Did I miss something?
I used a standard console cable (db9 to rj45) that came with my arista switch and it worked...
Someone asking if these switches can be used as "simple" L2 switches doesn't have a db9 to rj45 from their other enterprise switch lying around. It's a "new" cable for those of us whose experience is limited to dumb L2 switches.
Well yes, managed L2 was of my interest.
L3 is just unneccesary for me at the current moment.
If a serial cable is special, then you must be quite young
Nope, old fart. In my day, serial cables were DB25 or DB9 only. This is my first exposure to serial on an RJ45 connector, let alone serial on a mini USB as required for the 7250.
yeah I was gunna say, if the 5 minute setup guide for these things is a "complex setup" he probably hasn't used much networking equipment heh.
That's correct and I assume that someone asking if these can be used as "simple" L2 switches would have a similar experience level.
not to mention I don't think keeping a copy of tftpd32.exe somewhere and double clicking it once a year is a "pain in the butt", but that's just me (and that's only if you want to keep updating the thing to bleeding edge firmware)
That would be true if Windows 10 wasn't a huge turd. I had to disable the Windows firewall to get tftpd working. I had to search this thread to find your recommendation to do so. Ok, so tftpd is working...for a while. Flashes went well. Until they didn't. Rebooted Windows. Still not working. It was as if tftpd wasn't even running. I screwed around with Windows and tftpd for an hour with no success. I even tried running it as a Service. There is virtually zero documentation for tftpd64.exe.
I'm sure those of you who work with enterprise switches on a daily basis know all the the ins and outs of tftpd64.exe but for the first timer it can be a big time sink. Especially so, if like me, you barely know your way around Windows 10. I stopped paying attention to Windows after 7.
I should have started with Linux to begin with but due to unusual circumstances I don't have access to my usual Linux boxes. I dug out an old laptop and slapped Fedora on it. I installed the tftp-server package. Looked in /etc for a tftp.conf file. There was none.
Read the man pages. They suck, only upstream info, nothing about actually configuring on Fedora. Sigh... Head to google. Wow, the packager really did a crap job. Needed to copy and edit two service files to get it running. Not the usual "dpkg install, edit conf file, systemctl start service" experience you get with every other daemon in existence.
Given all of that, it's fair to say TFTP was a pain in the butt for me. Maybe not for you guys who have working installs ready to go because you use it daily for work.
I would have saved a lot of time and frustration if I'd gone the Linux route to begin with but I didn't want to take time time to do the Linux install. My fail on that.
Have some understanding for those of us new to enterprise gear. Not everyone gets to play with this stuff on a daily basis at work.
EDIT:
Just ordered a bunch of fiber stuff. Brace yourselves for noob questions the likes of which you've never seen before!
