Tuesday, June 7, 2016

Set management IP on a VLAN on Dell Force10 S55 Switch Stack

While these switches do have dedicated management ethernet ports, it's often simpler and neater to set a management IP on the normal out of band / management VLAN that's already trunked on the uplink. For whatever reason the official Dell knowledge base article on the subject leaves out a crucial detail! It's necessary to set a default route before communication can commence. If you haven't set an IP on the management port you can't issue the management route command. Instead you need to issue the following:
ip route 0.0.0.0/0 192.168.0.1
to set a normal default gateway for the switch. Once that's done you're all set!