fwsm and maintenance partition on production network

[alalli]

Good Day All,

Has anyone had to boot their fwsm into the maintenance partition while the catalyst switch was in a production network.

I have found the command hw-module module x reset cf:1; but am a little hesitant to use it....

Currently... we have installed the blades but are using seperate firewalls until we get the configurations right.

Well... as luck would have it; our Operating systems are miles off of each other. One is running ver 1.1(4) and the other is running 2.2(3). I need to run the same on both in order to use failover.

I am hoping to be able to tftp both operating systems to a server so i have a backup plan as well.

any ideas?

[owillins]

The maintenance partition is valuable for troubleshooting. For example, you can install new software to an application partition, reset passwords, or show crash dump information from the maintenance partition. You can only access the maintenance partition by sessioning into the FWSM.

http://www.cisco.com/univercd/cc/td/doc/product/lan/cat6000/mod_icn/fwsm/fwsm_2_2/fwsm_cfg/basic.htm#wp1049463

[alalli]

Hi All,

Thanks very much for the help. Yes. it is a new install. In the end, we did not use the maintenance partition. We overwrote the running IOS. That was something that i did not really want to do, but it was simple. Thankfully, everything turned out ok.

[#4]

It sounds like you are just preparing these for installation? If you have set up vlans to be firewalled to the FWSM they would be effected. But if you are just starting to set them up you should be OK. If you are seeting up "contexts" make sure you save the config in the Maintanance partition as well as in each of the contexts before resetting. And definately use the same code. If not they will ignore each other and both try to claim primary. Good luck to you!