Wednesday 18 November 2009

I can't get bootp or PXE on my 4006 Cisco

We hit this issue whilst replacing some old D-Link ( including a DES-6000 Core )switches with a Catalyst 4006 on Supervisor 2 (CAT OS).

We spent most of the day pulling cables, re-patching and geting it all looking smart :)

Booted up all the clients and everything worked as expected.

Then we wanted to re-image all the clients to a new image. When we tried to PXE boot the client the DHCP timed out and the boot failed.

If we had an old legacy switch connected to the port and then clients to that legacy kit then things worked. I knew roughly that the issue was down to spanning tree and the port not setting up fast enough ( it's already set up if another switch is connected ) but no matter what I tried with various commands ( turnign on/off spanning tree, port speed/duplex , etc ) it just would not play ball.

We were at the stage of giving up when I found a little talked about command.

"set port host"

This

sets the port channel mode to off
sets spanning tree to port fast
sets trunk mode to be off

you could do all this manualy if you had been told, or if there was decent information out there!

anyway correct useage is

cat4006> (enable) set port host card/port-port

if you want to set all ports in all line cards.

cat4006> (enable) set port host 1/1-48
cat4006> (enable) set port host 1/2-48
cat4006> (enable) set port host 1/3-48
cat4006> (enable) set port host 1/4-48
cat4006> (enable) set port host 1/5-48


It makes a lot of changes to your config. make sure no trunks or other switches are connected to these ports to avoid spanning tree problems.

Rob

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