theITHollow.com lab suffered an outage to the core switch a few weeks ago (an aging Cisco 3750) and I was looking for a replacement that wouldn’t break the bank.  Luckily I found the HP v1910-24G (JE006A) to be more than adequate. One of my main gripes with this switch was that the Command Line Interface was very limited.  See for yourself. While the cli out of the box is nice, and I would say necessary, there isn’t a lot that can be done with it.  For basic configuration tasks, you’ll be stuck with the Web GUI. But after digging through some HP discussion boards I found out that you can enable the Comware operating system commands.

Add Comware CLI

First things first, be sure to enable SSH or Telnet so that you can access the switch via a terminal emulator such as Putty.  To do this, I used the web client.   Next, use Putty to connect to the switch over SSH and login to the switch. Once you have a command line interface, run the following command:

_cmdline-mode on

You will then be asked if you want to allow all commands to be executed.  Of course you do! Then you’ll be asked for a password which I found on this HP Discussion Board.  The Password is 512900 Now that you’ve turned on the command line, you can use the normal Comware OS commands that you may be accustomed to running in order to configure things like VLANS and things.

DISCLAIMER:  Obviously you saw the warning in the previous screenshot that this should only be done with an Engineer’s guidance so I’m sure this is unsupported by HP, don’t use this in a production environment.  I’m guessing this switch is used in a lot of labs which is why I’m posting the info. If you are a Cisco or Procurve Admin and aren’t familiar with the syntax, I recommend looking at this guide.  I know that I did. One more thing I wanted to mention was that in Putty at least, the command line can be a bit frustrating because the backspace button on your keyboard won’t work.  I don’t know about you but I mistype things all the time so this is a problem.  To fix this, you can go to the Terminal –> Keyboard section of Putty and change the Backspace Key from “Control-?(127)” to “Control-H” which should resolve that issue for you. Now you can use the HP v1910-24G CLI to play around and configure your switch.  Have Fun!