So, I thought I’d share an experience I had yesterday where my Cisco UCS Fabric Interconnect (FI) wasn’t feeling well and in my attempt to resurrect it, I seemed to break it even more. I’m sure that never happens to you…The FI was now booting to a bash prompt instead of the normal UCS console interface. It would get to the point where it would say “System is coming up….Please wait” and it would say this about 12 times and then display the bash prompt. I won’t bore you with what I actually did in my attempt to get beyond this, but lets just say I spent about 2 hours debugging it when the fix should have only taken about 5 minutes (hindsight is 20/20). It goes without saying that this situation should not happen under normal circumstances, but I’ve heard rumblings of people seeing this here and there after upgrading to 2.2.x. So if Google brought you here looking for a solution, you’re in luck.
All you need to do is:
bash# shutdown -r now
As the FI boots, press Ctrl + r to interrupt the boot process
loader>dir
Get the UCS kickstart file name – it would be preferable for you to boot the actual file name that the FI has in the /installables/switch folder which is the name of the kickstart image that you last installed. This can be found by looking at the working FI and running “scope firmware” and then “show image” (that’s from memory but I think that’s it). However, you can use the kickstart in the root if you can’t figure it out.
loader> boot ucs-6100-k9-kickstart.5.0.3.N2.<xyzabc>.bin
When the system comes up and sits are the boot prompt, run “erase configuration”
switch(boot)# erase configuration
That should do it. The FI needs to reboot and come back up as if it were brand new and ask to create/join the cluster.
Hope this saves someone some time.
-Jeff