The ProCurve 5400zl series have a USB port on them that you can use to transfer files, in addition to TFTP and SCP/SFTP. Since I had a few of these to upgrade and they were in a lab environment (e.g. not connected to any “real” networks), I didn’t want to bother with setting up a TFTP server. The upgrade process is pretty straightforward and is similar to doing an upgrade via TFTP.
We can find the latest software for our ProCurve switches on the “Software for switches” page. Software (”firmware”) updates do not require that you have a valid login or service contract, unlike Cisco. I grabbed the latest version (at the time of writing), which is K.13.45 (be sure to read the Release Notes that accompany each release as well, prior to performing an upgrade). Save the .downloaded file to your USB flash drive and plug the flash drive into the switch.
To check what version of the software is currently running, issue the “show version” command:
SW1# show versionImage stamp: /sw/code/build/btm(t3a) Aug 4 2008 15:08:24 K.13.25 93Boot Image: PrimaryWe can see that we’re running version K.13.25 and that we booted from the primary flash. We can see the current contents of flash, as well as our USB drive:
SW1# show flashImage Size(Bytes) Date Version----- ---------- -------- -------Primary Image : 7442476 08/04/08 K.13.25 Secondary Image : 6782942 12/07/07 K.12.57 Boot Rom Version: K.12.12Default Boot : PrimarySW1# dir Listing Directory /ufa0:-rwxrwxAwx 1 0 0 7442476 Nov 3 2008 K_13_25.SWI -rwxrwxAwx 1 0 0 7494786 Oct 30 2008 K_13_45.SWI SW1#Because I’ve been running K.13.25 and it’s been stable, I’m going to copy it to secondary flash and then overwrite the primary with the new software. We’ll then reboot the switch with the new software (keeping the previous version in secondary as a “backup” in case anything goes wrong).
SW1# copy flash flash secondaryThis command isn’t real intuitive (and it takes a while as well), but here we’re basically copying from flash, to flash, with the secondary as our destination. In this case, the contents of the primary flash will be copied to the secondary. “copy flash flash primary” would copy the contents of the secondary into the primary. Let’s verify what we have now:
SW1# show flashImage Size(Bytes) Date Version----- ---------- -------- -------Primary Image : 7442476 08/04/08 K.13.25 Secondary Image : 7442476 08/04/08 K.13.25 Boot Rom Version: K.12.12Default Boot : PrimaryWe can see that the contents of the primary have now been copied to the secondary as well. Let’s copy the K1345.SWI image from the USB drive to primary flash:
SW1# copy usb flash K_13_45.SWI primaryThe Primary OS Image will be deleted, continue [y/n]? yAfter a moment, we’ll see this message:
Validating and Writing System Software to the Filesystem ...When the copy has completed, we need to reload the switch with the new software:
SW1# boot system flash primarySystem will be rebooted from primary image. Do you want to continue [y/n]? yThe switch will take a minute to reboot (I won’t bother pasting the complete bootup process) and then we can, again, use “show version” to verify that we’re now running the latest software:
SW1# show versionImage stamp: /sw/code/build/btm(t3a) Oct 17 2008 20:03:02 K.13.45 706Boot Image: PrimarySee, wasn’t that easy!? We’ve successfully upgraded the firmware, and we’ve also kept a backup copy of the previous software in case things go badly. If that happens, just issue the “boot system flash secondary” command to reload the switch with the previous software.
This “upgrade via USB” method can come in handy at times, e.g. when the switch is in a lab and you don’t have a server handy to load the files from. For the switches in my production network, I would use SFTP to ugprade them instead of having to visit each switch individually to plug in and remove the USB drive. Yes, you can SFTP to the switch and upload a new version of firmware. It rocks. =)
Wow, thanks for ripping off my post, verbatim.
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