Hi,

Couldn't reply better than Joe, only one thing that i want to stress on, the switch must initially have an IP to communicate with, so it should be manually configured with this IP, or you shall depend upon the DHCP server giving it an IP.

HTH, please do rate all helpful replies,

Mohammed Mahmoud.

Thanks for the reply, just to clarify - this is a proof of concept prior to presenting the results to my manager.

So for the test I have a Cisco 801 router connected to a 2924XL switch. The router is et up for DHCP and the configuration of the switch is clean (i.e. no config).

When I power up the switch I do get an IP address from the DHCP server (as well as the gateway address), and the switch then display a "Continue with configuration dialog? [yes/no]:" prompt and I enter NO.

This leaves me at a > prompt. I then have to type enable and wr m to start the TFTP pull of the image.

It seems that the conf pulled from TFTP goes straight to the startup-conf, which means I then have to do a copy start run to get the image into the right place...

What I want to do is plug the switch into the router, and everything be done automatically so that the tftp image is pulled from the tftp server and written straight to the running conf (the IP address pulled from DHCP is not the IP I want to use on the switch).

Also,in your reply you indicate there are various conf files that can be used i.e. network-config, switch-config, or cisconet.cfg, and also ""service config" is enabled" - where can I find information about using these.

I guess what I want is a step by step, hand holding guide on how to do what I am trying to do - especially the automatic configuration.

The eventual aim is to have all the confs for all our switches (approximately 1500) on our LMS server so that if a switch fails, anybody can patch it in and it will be up and running.

We are a retail organisation with 150 stores across the UK and we do not have technical staff in each store to do this so if a person with a bit of intelligence can be talked through patching it in it would save us a lot of time and effort.

thanks

You're probably not wating long enough (i.e. for spanning tree to finish up). Yes, you will get the autoinstall menu, but if you give it a few seconds, the switch will send a DHCP discover. When it gets an offer, it will autoconfig itself, then you will see it start to request the configs. Once it finds one of the matching configs on the network, it will autoconfig itself, then the autoinstall will terminate, and you will be back at the switch prompt.

The switch will request, besides its IP address, the TFTP server (option 66) and the boot file name (option 67). So I configured my DHCP server to advertise the correct TFTP server and a boot file of "nms-3750-b.cfg" (as a test), and like magic, I had an automatically configured switch out-of-the-box.

Hello NetPros,

I came across two problems with autoinstall:

We have two servers, each running DHCP and TFTP services.

1. When using Option 150 with two TFTP IP addresses, the router/switch use only the first IP address. Therefore if your first TFTP service is down, the router/switch will not try to use the second one.

2. When using Autoinstall for switch, the configuration of vlan cannot be made from the configuration downloaded from the TFTP server.

If you have overcome these problems I would really appreciate an explanation.

Thank you in advance.

Best regards,

Christophe