Networking – Why does the HP switch appear to be reporting inconsistent information

networkingpiracyswitch

I have a HP 1810-8G (J9802A) 8-port managed switch (according to its labels). I bought this one because of its capability of mirroring the traffic to a port.

Now I'm wondering whether this may not actually be a real / official HP product, due to the following:

  1. The login screen sais ProCurve 1700-8 (J9079A)
  2. The graphical representation says ProCurve 1800-8 (J9029A)
  3. The link status shows port 6 and 8 active, but actually I have connected cables to port 1 and 2

Screenshots:

Login screen

Port status

What is happening here? Could this be a non-original product, and if so, what steps can I take to verify whether this is the case?

Best Answer

I finally figured it out:

My company has bought many HP switches over time of similar types (1700-8 (J9079A), 1800-8G (J9029A), 1810G-8GE (J9449A)) and installed them without changing the IP address and without changing the passwords.

When connecting to the IP of my switch at its default IP 192.168.2.10, the IP address was resolved to a MAC address via the ARP protocol. Depending on which of the switches answered first (or last?), the login was made to the wrong switch, thus the product type and the ports in use changed.

I didn't immediately notice this, except that I wondered why I have to login again. After changing the password, I found that I could not login any more and tried the default password - and it worked.

This made me wonder, so I lokked into the ARP cache. I saw that the MAC address for the default IP 192.168.2.10 changed often. It seems that the ARP cache has quite a short lifetime on Windows. In total I have identified 8 different switches.

IMHO leaving so many switches in default configuration without password is a security risk and I reported that to the IT department. What a pity that they have not detected this themselves.

In order to be able to configure my switch under the given circumstances, I first deleted the ARP cache with

arp -d 192.168.2.10

and then added a static ARP entry for my switch

arp -s 192.168.2.10 XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX

I could then connect to my switch and change its IP address to a different value, set the passwort etc.

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