Upgrade the firmware on a brocade switch

Yep I love doing this…. it’s really easy as long as you have an FTP server or run ftp on your desktop and have firewalls allowed…

 

The brocade switch needs to be able to download the firmware from a FTP server.  Once you have an FTP it’s easy to do the install of firmware.  The process downloads the firmware and installs it on the secondary CP then moves load over the the secondary cp.  Once all load is on the secondary CP then it upgrades the first CP.  This way the code is completely loaded and verified before load gets moved to the new system.

 

Once you have the FTP setup then you can login to the switch via ssh (or telnet yuk disable it and use ssh) and issue the following command:

 

firmwaredownload

 

It will list a series of prompts to help you install the firmware the most important is the location this is relative to where the ftp server drops you… for example mine drops you into the users home directory which is /home/username and I have my firmware unpacked into /v6.4.2.b so the full path is /home/username/v6.4.2.b but when connecting via ftp the path is v6.4.2.

 

You will be disconnected during the firmware update you can reconnect pretty quickly and use the following command to check status:

 

showfirmwaredownload

 

This will display the current status.  You can also use version to check that it’s been upgraded.

 

 

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