In cisco switches 6 lights are at the left (for example 3550 series)
There is a mode button at the left,pushing that will take us to another mode in six modes.
1.system:first the green will blink and after it started properly the green light stays on,if the light is amber give the switch back.
2.RPS(Redundant Power Supply):Some switches have multiple power supply in case one got bad.If the redundant power supply us connected to power the green light will be on.
3.STAT:shows status of the port,if something is connected to the port it will be green,some port will blink if its having some network activity ,if nothing plugged in the stat will be dark.
4.UTIL:utilization which constantly monitors the the utilization of the ports.
5.DUPLEX:checks if full duplex is configured.
6.SPEED:checks if the port is 100 mb/s or 10mb/s.The light is on for 100 and not on for 10.
When a switch boots up(here for example 3550 series)
the post operation(power on self test)starts
It shows the base mac address
Shows information about the flash bios system where it stores the ios
It basically copy the flash in ram and uncompress it
Then you can see some copyright information
Then the model of the switch
Then the version of the ios
Then will check every component inside it the processor,the memory,the interfaces
When it show its memory it will basically devide the whole memory in separate chunks as all cisco devices,so the whole memory would be the summation of those for example 65526k/8192k
Then it shows what kind of switching image you are running (if it's layer 2/3 or compatible with both layer 2 and 3)
Then shows the interfaces
Then summarizes the interfaces. For example
24 fast ethernet interfaces/IEEE 802.3 interface(s)
2 Gigabit Ethernet/IEEE 802.3 interface(s)
Then shows how much nvram(non-volatile memory)it has for example 384K bytes of flash-simulated non-volatile configuration memory
Then comes the intial config dialog box
just type n and press enter
Type en to enter the exec mode abd then type conf t to enter the global mode
? for help
to set a hostname
from flobal config mode
There are 3 modes
User mode ,privileged mode or exec mode, global configuration mode
To get back to exec mode
Type end or exit or ctrl + z
Error code ambiguous command means it's right but still need to be defined more
Error code invalid input detected means command is wrong
From exec mode type show history to see all commands
ctrl + e moves cursor to the end of the line
ctrl + a moves cursor to beginning of the line
To give switch an ip
By default every port in a switch is in vlan1
So we have to create a virtual interface named interface vlan 1(doesn't exist physically)
Every device on vlan 1 are now able to access it and we can access the switch remotely using this ip
To configure interface vlan 1
In global config mode
Type
interface vlan 1
ip address 192.168.1.1 255.255.255.0(just an example)
no shutdown(no basically negates a command to reverse it's effect for example no hostname negates the hostname that you put in ur switch and changes the hostname to the previous one)
To see an interface
In the exec mode
type
sh int vlan 1
now we have to give the switch a gateway address so that it can go in different network
go in the global mode
Type
ip default-gateway 192.168.1.254
Now to see the running configuration
From exec mode
show running-config or sh run
To save the configuration from ram to nvram
copy running-config startup-config
To see the startup configuration
From exec mode
To see the basic information about switch
From exec mode
Type
show version
