I was tasked with reclaiming some decommissioned network appliances. More specifically, some pretty decent Lanner appliances. Multiple ethernet interfaces, 16GB RAM, and a decent processor.
Fun, right? Well….
No access, no passwords. They have IPMI, but we don’t have passwords for that either.
We have access to serial, but all that gives us is access to BIOS, and then a boot failure, ostensibly because they’ve been wiped.
So I fought with this in several directions before coming up with a possible solution.
Wrestle with BIOS until I can get it to PXE boot. Set it to PXE from LAN0. Boot it, see what MAC address it comes up with. Add that MAC to my FOG server and deploy an image via FOG. In my case, I imaged it with Rocky Linux 8.4.
Then, because it’s still unconfigured, incomplete and flying blind, go back to serial, boot to the hard disk, edit the grub menu entry to add “console=ttyS0,115200” to the linux line, then let her rip. Sure enough, it’s now fully booting to serial and I’m able to IP it, set up permanent console redirection, make sure sshd is starting, and boom.
I probably could have done mostly the same thing with a USB boot disk, but then I’m stuck doing a full install, whereas using FOG gives me an already-standardized image. Now I’ll be done with this stack in about two bourbons.