Today I’m starting to upgrade my almost 40 Cisco Catalyst 3560G switches to a newer version of the IOS. Since these switches were installed over the course of about 2 years, a lot of them are running different IOS versions, so it’s time to get everything up to snuff and running the same version across the board. The latest version that’s installed on any of them is 12.2(25) SEE3 and according to Cisco support that version is now in deferral and it’s suggested to move to version 12.2(44) SE5. But…that version is also in deferral so the suggested is 12.2(44) SE6. Now at the time of this writing, the latest version is 12.2.50-SE. But I’m going to stick with version 12.2(44) SE6 for now as I’m not one to jump on the latest version of anything unless I absolutely have to.
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Archive for April, 2009
Upgrading a Cisco Catalyst Switch
Wednesday, April 15th, 2009Using Active Directory to authenticate to your Cisco routers & switches
Tuesday, April 14th, 2009If you’re managing your Cisco routers, switches, etc. using local accounts created on each device, you need to read this article. Being relatively new to the Cisco IOS myself, I get excited when I find a time saver such as this. It’s one of those things that I knew could be done, but just never took the time to investigate it. What I’m talking about it leveraging Active Directory as the authentication method into the Cisco IOS. So instead of creating and managing user accounts on the Cisco equipment, you can use the existing user accounts in AD. I’ll start by setting up and configuring the Internet Authentication Service, Microsoft’s version of a RADIUS server, in which the Cisco equipment will use to access AD for authentication.
