The Silo Chronicles
The not so exciting adventures of a Network Engineer

Last night I was had a simple task of adding a new 3750 to an existing stack. I went in thinking it would be a cake walk as they auto-upgrade and basically I was just going to have to rack it and connect some stack cables. Like most things recently there was more to it. This customer happen to have a very old 1.5U 3750 with 16mb of flash. It happened to be the master of the stack as well. This proved to be very annoying when trying to get the switch in the stack. The first problem was the current revision of code was too old and since the new switch was a later hardware revision it refused to auto-upgrade since it wasn’t sure it could support it. The customer used the web interface so I did the archive upgrade reloaded the stack and when it came back up only the first two switches actually upgraded. The new switch was still on the old revision. I then attempted to manually start the upgrade only to run into “Unable to create temp dir “flash:update”" error. This was quickly resolved with a “delete /recursive /force flash:update”. Unfortunately this is when I discovered that since it only had 16mb of flash it didn’t actually have enough to store the image for auto upgrades. After about an hour and a half I said screw it, loaded the bins on them and reloaded the stack… Victory was mine!

Morals of this story:

1. Look at which switch is your master. If it is an old hardware revision be prepared for some issues
2. Check the amount of available flash on your master switch. If it is only 16mb auto-upgrade most likely will not work.
3. When push comes to shove you can also just load the .bin files on all members manually (TIP: Use copy flash1: flash2: etc… to save time when loading it between stack members)

As you are most likely aware there are 512mb AIM-CUE cards floating around. Unfortunately you can not run any of the recent releases on these cards as they all need 1GB. The pickle is how do you tell which card is installed? The answer is quite easy in fact however it is far from obviously. If you want to see which card you have installed do the following:

1. Connect to Router
2. Session to the module. (Example: service-module service-Engine 1/0 session). For more instructions on this see the previous post on how to password recover the CUE module.
3. Issue the command ‘’show software license”. It will give you the following output.
   cue> show software license
   Core:
   – Application mode: CCME
   – Total usable system ports: 6

   Voicemail/Auto Attendant:
   – Max system mailbox capacity time: 840
   – Default # of general delivery mailboxes: 10
   – Default # of personal mailboxes: 25

   – Max # of configurable mailboxes: 35

   Languages:
   – Max installed languages: 1
   – Max enabled languages: 1

4. What we are looking for is the ”Max system mailbox capacity time”. If it says 840 you have a 1GB module, if it says 480 you have the 512mb module.

Like I said, not very hard but not very obvious.

My adventures in Network land today brought me to a poor ignored AIM-CUE module running CUE 2.1. The customer was interested in us doing some upgrades to their CCME and CUE so I was poking around to get some basic info on the deployment. The only problem was the customer did not know the username/password. Luckily he knew the login/password for the router which makes access to CUE very simple.

1. Connect to the Router and establish level 15 access
2. You need to determine what the ServiceEngine number for CUE is. You do that by issuing a show ip interface brief. It should look similar to the following:
   Router#show ip interface brief
   Interface IP-Address OK? Method Status Protocol
   FastEthernet0/0 192.168.10.1 YES NVRAM up up
   FastEthernet0/1 unassigned YES NVRAM administratively down down
   Service-Engine1/0 192.168.10.4 YES TFTP up up
3. Once you know the number type the following command service-module service-Engine 1/0 session. In this example CUE is installed at ServiceEngine1/0. Hit enter a few times and you should see a new command prompt.
4. You now what to take a look at the users and see which accounts are there and which ones are administrators. To get a list of users type show users.
   cue>show users
   admin
   johndoe
   davidsmith

   To get a list of Administrators type show group detail groupname Administrators.

   cue>show group detail groupname Administrators
   Full Name: Administrators
   Description:
   Phone:
   Phone(E.164):
   Language: systemDefault(en_US)
   Owners:
   Members: admin johndoe
   Privileges: superuser ManagePrompts ManagePublicList ViewPrivateList
5. If the username is “admin” you can reset the password by issuing the following command user admin password cisco.

As you can see it is very easy to do. If you are concerned about resetting a password you can also create a new administrator account by using the following commands:

As you can see if you have level 15 access to the router you can session over to the CUE module and reset any password you like. I would highly recommend you make sure that the service-module command stays strictly restricted to level 15.