I’ve been through this many times over, and thought I would share: I just bought a pair of HP Storageworks 4/8 SAN (AKA: Brocade Silkworm 200E) switches off of eBay. They were listed as “powered up / as-is” by the seller, but the price was too good not to take a risk on them working properly.
Of course, they came with no documentation, and not even a label to identify the IP address they held in their original home. (I have had luck with other items where the IP and even login/password were labelled onto the front of the case).
Most times, the following will work flawlessly:
- Connect your new piece of tech’s management interface (in this case, we’ll use the example of my SAN switch) to the same ethernet switch used by your workstation.
- Close down any superfluous network applications to cut down on the amount of traffic that Wireshark will see.
- Open up Wireshark and set it to capture on the same interface that is exposed to the SAN switch.
- Power up the SAN switch and let it boot fully (usually there will be some indication of when booting is complete by the lights in the front).
- Stop capture in Wireshark, and sort the output by the “Source” column.
- Scroll through the source column carefully. You should see ARP requests or SNMP messages coming from an unknown interface, usually broadcasting/requesting IP information in the 10.0.0.0/8, 192.168.0.0/16, or 172.16.0.0/12 range.
- Once you have the correct IP address, assign an additional IP address and subnet to your workstation’s NIC that will be in range with the IP address of your eBay item.
- Open up a web browser, and go to the address in question.
This is what I saw when setting up my “new” switches today:
That’s the type of thing you’ll be looking for. Although my switch is branded by HP, it’s actually a Brocade switch, hence the source MAC address’ (with translated vendor id) is “BrocadeC_04:4a:c4″. Sometimes you will see the name of the manufacturer that you expected, or you may see the name of a generic NIC manufacturer such as Intel, Broadcom, or 3com.
The ARP announcement indicates that my switch’s IP address is 172.26.6.83! I gave my workstation the additional IP address of 172.26.6.1/255.255.255.0. I was then able to navigate to that address in my web browser.
All that’s left is to try some default/obvious passwords. If that fails, it’s on to a hardware reset of the switches!
Update: After about 10 seconds of Googling, I found this on HP’s support forum:
I am now in the process of configuring my switches. It’s not always this easy, but I do love it when it is!
