Turning on the PoE Inside HP 5500 switch

A somewhat rare moment requires an onsite visit with a console cable and a terminal session. A show and tell of a service call to get a PoE WiFi device back online.

Helpdesk is 200 Miles Away and Tried to Remote Session

Unlike other switches in the makes of Cisco, UniFi, NetGear and so on. This HP switch is not a Procurve, it is more like a Comware configured device. Using a CLI to access and manage. There are two parts to this story. In the first part, it's a MacBook Pro and Terminal getting the command line connected. The second part is the Comware CLI that tells the switch how to configure.

Terminal On Mac OSX

There is nothing to add to make this work in the MacOS environment. Today I am using a console cable with the standard Cisco 8 pin RJ45 to USB Type-C. Simply connected to the console port of the HP 5500. Launching the Terminal and finding my way to the /dev directory. Scouting around for a usb connection. Mine is called tty.usbserial-A9FYRGNO and I use the screen command to mount this connection. ENTER.

cd /dev

ls

This is where a large list of dev will display, we are only interested in a tty.usbserial. ENTER

screen tty.usbserial-A9FYRGNO

At the prompt. It will have the switch <hostname> and the LOGIN:

We are ready to go to work inside this session.

Comware CLI

We will just focus on turning on PoE on a port.

Our needed port for PoE is port 23. This is connected to a FortiNet FortiAP that sits dark until we get PoE through the ethernet cable.

In this display, we are going to see Chassis ID Port ID details to this specific switch

To select port 23 to modify, ENTER

interface gigabitethernet 1/0/23

We are actively focused on this port

To get information about this port and its status, ENTER.

display this

a return of simple information will look like this, did you noticed no PoE?

#

interface GigabitEthernet1/0/23

port link-mode bridge

#

To turn on PoE, ENTER

poe enable

The port will go UP and DOWN two and half times and stabilize.

We may already see our PoE WiFi AP start to turn on and broadcast the SSID.

A new setting will look like this for port 23

%May 14 14:20:03:153 2000 HOSTNAME POE/4/PD_STATUS:

GigabitEthernet1/0/23: Port poe on: 802.3af-compliant PD ,rawstatus=0x1.

For the sake of future power outages, save this configuration, ENTER

save

Comware will question. Are you sure? ENTER

Y

These settings will be saved into the [*.cfg:flash/startup.cfg]

It will be over written.

Once it is saved, you may exit, ENTER

quit

We have just turned on PoE on port 23 of the HP 5500 using Comware CLI.

Google or DuckDuckGo references to Comware 5 and 7

It is very common to see other vendors in this space with their own unique application around Comware. Explore and look around for a variety of HP switch models to see other networking commands, guides and simulators.

Search for:

• comware v7

• comware v5

• comware switches

• comware software

• compare simulators

That was fun.

Cheers