Dealing with a EMC storage appliance without support can be a pain for technical staff . Recently I have been to a customer location where an active Clarion AX4-5 need to be used to provide storage space for a new critical application. But no information with respect to management IP and credentials where available !
I was left with the task of resetting the password myself. To my wonder, that device was using Navisphere Express and the task of resetting got even harder.I am going to explain the steps which I followed to reset the password without compromising any data stored inside the storage.
Firstly, we need to have EMC Micro-DB9 To DB9/F Null Modem Serial cable and connect it to the Management port on primary SP. Unlike new storage devices from EMC this does not look like a LAN port. Below is the picture (MGMT ).
Use a compatible USB to serial converter and connect that to a Windows XP machine. The objective is to create a dial-up connection to the clarion which will help us provide both management IP of SP and help reset password.
Secondly, create a dial-up networking on Windows XP. For that on control panel select Network Connections, create new connection and from there choose advance connection.
Choose connect to another computer as guest. Name the connection and opt for the appropriate com port and save the connection. Edit properties of the connection and change the connection speed to 115200 as shown in the picture below.
Dial the connection using username clariion and the default password. A successful connection will provide the machine with an ip address.
Further to that, open internet explorer on the same machine and type http://192.168.1.1/setup. Here storage processor ip will be provided along with other options. Among those there are two options, one is to “create another administrator account” and the second is to “destroy security and domain information” which requires SP’s to be restarted. I opt for create another admin account to simplify the tasks.
To conclude, dealing with some end of life equipment’s can be a hard, but proper research and action plan can save time and avoid mishaps to corporate data and availability of their services.
Cloud and Security 