HP ProCurve 2610 – Basic Setup using console cable

In this guide I am going to show how to perform a very basic setup of a HP ProCurve 2610 Layer 2 network switch using a serial to console cable.

First up you will need a serial to console cable and a PC that has a serial port. If you don’t have a PC with a serial port (old HPs are great for this purpose) then you can get a USB to serial adapter – a point to note here is watch out for the super cheap ones, quite often you will find that they use counterfeit chips meaning USB drivers don’t work reliably.

Anywhos on with the guide!

First up the network switch that I have has been previously protected with a password, in addition I want to configure the switch from scratch. To do this I am going to perform a factory reset and clear…

Now its time to configure the switch, for the configuration I will be using PuTTY which can be downloaded from here – http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/.