I was in a sticky situation this weekend. I had casually set up one of our APC UPS RT 5000 units to use DHCP to get a statically assigned address. However, I hadn’t implemented Option 43 on the DHCP server and the APC management card had fallen off the network.
Unable to find a serial cable of the right type, and unable to get the card onto the subnet, I was faced with resetting the firmware. That was until I read the manual!
With the APC9619 card, at least, if you know the MAC address (I did, it was in our DHCP server config), you can prod the card with an ICMP packet to assign the desired address.
Simply do this…
Assign an IP address to the MAC address in your local ARP table
sudo arp -s 10.240.64.32 00:C0:B7:CA:D8:9B
Ping the address with a 113 byte ICMP packet.
ping 10.240.64.32 -s 113
This causes the management card to accept the address as its own, and at that point you can now telnet to the card and enter the administration console (unless you like clicky pointy things, in which case you can use your web browser)
It seems to time out rather quickly, so don’t mess about in the admin console. Jump in, remove the DHCP Vendor cookie requirement (2, 1, 1, 1, 2, 8, 1, 9) and reboot the management card.
All done! No cables, no firmware, no massive reconfiguration.
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