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Networking

Resetting two Cisco Catalyst 2950 switches to factory defaults

In my last post on the Cisco CCNA, it was mentioned that an order for two used Cisco Catalyst 2950 switches had been placed. Well, the two switches arrived a few days later. So I plugged them in, but that was all I could do because there were no Console cables (aka. Rollover cables) to be found in the box. Granted, I wasn’t really expecting any since the seller had not mentioned any, but to connect to a switch that I knew nothing about, the smart bet was to connect via the RJ-45 jack (which is actually a 9600 bps serial port.)

If you already know how to physically connect to your 2950 switch, click here to jump to the Catalyst 2950 password recovery procedure.

If you don’t have the appropriate tools yet, this means that 3 things will be needed to get started: a Rollover Cable, a USB-to-Serial adapter, and some Terminal software. This is what I picked: