I have been experimenting with a new Cisco Switch that I got today.  Here is the model:

Cisco WS-C2924C-XL-EN Catalyst 2900 XL 24 port Switch

This switch has 8MB of DRAM and 4MB of system flash.  This switch was also purchased used from eBay and therefore comes with a sort of “use at your own risk” mentality.  Incidentially, it also comes with a “configure at your own risk” mentality.  This is a perfect example because this switch came with some hardcore configurations that I have never seen before – we’re talking very strong security here!

The first thing I did was look up how to do password recovery from Cisco, the link is here.

That’s all fine and dandy.  And by the way the reason I needed to do this was not only because the switch had passwords to the IOS that were unknown to me, but it also had a local username and password (detailed here) database setup.  This meant that I could not even access the CLI unless I could authenticate at the local username level.  Ugh.

So anyway, once I was able to access the CLI via the password recovery article noted above, I had to figure out how to get rid of that stupid local username database.  Referencing the Petri article, I typed the following command at the PRIVILEGED EXEC mode:

username admin priv 15 password cisco

I changed all of the other passwords to the default, cisco, and then wrote to memory via “write mem“.  I reloaded via “reload“.  Once the switch came back up, I entered my new local username and password and – I was in!  Then I simply did a “write erase” and reloaded the switch again.  All was well again and I could start fresh.

It’s imperative that you wait until you have reloaded the switched, and logged into the CLI under normal operating conditions before you “write erase” the device.  Otherwise it won’t work and you’ll be left with the same problem as before.

I hope this helps anyone out there who is sort of new to configuring and managing these devices, like me.