Resetting a HP ProCurve 2824

Feb 26, 2016

#homelab#hp#switches#hardware

Warning: This post was written 3221 days ago, and may contain incorrect information, outdated opinions, and incorrect language due to my age at the time. Opinions in this post are not representative of who I am as a person today.

Another day, another switch. This time i’ve bought a second HP ProCurve 2824, they’re solid and reliable and with a quick replacement to the fans they’re damn near silent. Throw in the full Layer 2 feature set and a basic Layer 3 (named by HP as L3-lite) its a workhorse of a switch suited for small environment or edge switches on larger networks.

Main problem is that most of these ex-corporate switches come pre-configured with some setup you neither know or care about, thankfully resetting this switch is amazingly easy.

1. With the power on, poke the Reset and Clear buttons at the same time with whatever pokey devices you can find.
2. Release the Reset button
3. Wait until the Test LED starts blinking
4. Release the Clear button

Within a few seconds you’ll have a factory default switch, grab your straight through serial cable and have a play with the CLI.

Its worth taking the time to get the firmware up to date, remember to check the change logs and the documentation as some interim steps may be needed to bring it up to the current version. The software for this switch has progressed quite a bit, its still the same horrible Java based Web UI but little features introduced here and there really help out.