We had a situation a few weeks ago where we needed to stand up some HP / Cisco 9124e switches in a hurry. Unfortunately our data centre people initialized the switches and weren’t available to tell us what point they’d gotten to. We could see the switches in Fabric Manager and Device Manager, but for some reason we couldn’t ssh to the devices. And for some other reason we couldn’t generate a key to use with the switches. SAN-OS version is 3.3(4a). So here’s what we did to generate keys on the console (accessed via the HP Onboard Administrator on the blade chassis).
login as: admin
—————————————————————————–
WARNING: This is a private system. Do not attempt to login unless you are an
authorized user. Any authorized or unauthorized access and use may be moni-
tored and can result in criminal or civil prosecution under applicable law.
—————————————————————————–
Firmware Version: 3.21
Built: 11/15/2010 @ 09:59
OA Bay Number: 1
OA Role: Active
admin@256.256.256.256’s password:
HP BladeSystem Onboard Administrator
(C) Copyright 2006-2010 Hewlett-Packard Development Company, L.P.
Type ‘HELP’ to display a list of valid commands.
Type ‘HELP <command>’ to display detailed information about a specific command.
Type ‘HELP HELP’ to display more detailed information about the help system.
CHASSIS-OA1> connect interconnect 3
NOTICE: This pass-thru connection to the integrated I/O console
is provided for convenience and does not supply additional access
control. For security reasons, use the password features of the
integrated switch.
Connecting to integrated switch 3 at 9600,N81…
Escape character is ‘<Ctrl>_’ (Control + Shift + Underscore)
Press [Enter] to display the switch console:
User Access Verification
switch1 login: admin
Password:
Cisco Storage Area Networking Operating System (SAN-OS) Software
TAC support: http://www.cisco.com/tac
Copyright (c) 2002-2009, Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved.
The copyrights to certain works contained herein are owned by
other third parties and are used and distributed under license.
Some parts of this software may be covered under the GNU Public
License or the GNU Lesser General Public License. A copy of
each such license is available at
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html and
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl.html
switch1# sh ssh key
**************************************
could not retrieve rsa key information
**************************************
could not retrieve dsa key information
**************************************
no ssh keys present. you will have to generate them
**************************************
switch1# conf t
Enter configuration commands, one per line. End with CNTL/Z.
switch1(config)# ssh key rsa 1024
generating rsa key(1024 bits)…..
.
generated rsa key
switch1(config)# exit
switch1# copy run start
And then it was all better.