Powering Off Older Cisco Switches from Command-Line

[kellyjn88]

Hi,

Quick question on powering off older Cisco switches - the one I'm using is a 2924-XL running Cisco IOS 12.0 but I guess this also applies to other older switches such as 3550. Is there any way of powering these off from the IOS command-line? Can't figure out if this can be done, no joy searching the web etc. There doesn't even appear to be an on-off switch so as of now the only way I can figure out to power it down is to pull the power cable...

Thanks,

John.

[Jon Marshall]

kellyjn88 wrote:
Hi,
Quick question on powering off older Cisco switches - the one I'm using is a 2924-XL running Cisco IOS 12.0 but I guess this also applies to other older switches such as 3550. Is there any way of powering these off from the IOS command-line? Can't figure out if this can be done, no joy searching the web etc. There doesn't even appear to be an on-off switch so as of now the only way I can figure out to power it down is to pull the power cable...
Thanks,
John.

John

Not as far as i am aware. The only way to power these devices off is to remove the power cable. Just make sure you save the config first.

Jon

[glen.grant · Accepted solution]

   No there is no way to do that .  On chassis based switches you can turn off individual line cards but not the chassis itself.

[Leo Laohoo]

Is there a reason why you wanted to do this?

I'm not sure if we share the same reason but in my case I wanted to brick the device.  So I deleted the IOS, scheduled a reboot some time in the future and came in the next morning with a feigned look of surprise. 

[kellyjn88]

Hi,

Thanks for the information so far. There is no specific reason I wanted to do this ... just wanted to double-check as the power cable pull seemed excessively extreme as the only option to me...

John.

[Jon Marshall]

kellyjn88 wrote:
Hi,
Thanks for the information so far. There is no specific reason I wanted to do this ... just wanted to double-check as the power cable pull seemed excessively extreme as the only option to me...
John.

John

Yes your'e right it does seem a bit drastic. Coming from a Unix background where just pulling is absolutely the wrong thing to do it took me a while to get used to

Jon

[Leo Laohoo]

Before you power off the appliance, invoke the reload command first.  This way the appliance will "gracefully" terminate the services.   Pull the plug when you see the appliance is already loading the bootstrap.

[paolo bevilacqua]

You cannot remotely power down cisco devices, but you can make so they go down and not come up active again, that practically achieves the same effect.

To do this, change the configuration register to "boot loader" setting, and reload.