VPNRouter

Nortel VPN Router 1700 Restore Backup

1
May 10, 2008
by Michael McNamara in

VPNRouter1750 We recently had an issue were the configuration of a Nortel VPN Router 1700 became corrupt causing the VPN router to continually core dump and reboot itself. The solution required us to boot the VPN router from a floppy boot disk (the floppy disk was a previously created emergency recovery diskette – the floppy drive can be accessed by removing the front bezel). After we booted from the floppy disk we could factory reset the configuration and then restore the configuration from the previous night’s backup.

We needed to assign a temporary IP address from the serial interface and then use Internet Explorer to connect to the temporary IP address. We then selected the option to “Restore” the configuration from a backup. The backup needs to be an FTP site with the appropriate username and password.

VPNRouter1

The restore took about 30 minutes to complete and never really gave any indication that it was working other than the IE logo just swirling in the upper right hand corner of Internet Explorer. We were able to use Nortel’s Java Device Manager to confirm that there was a lot of data moving over the Ethernet switch port connecting the Nortel VPN Router so we knew it was probably working.

I should point out that the Nortel VPN Router 1010, 1050 and 1100 do not have floppy drives although they may support a PROM based recovery option which would need to be executed from the CLI (serial) interface while the router booted.

It also seems that Nortel will be manufacture discontinuing the Nortel VPN Router 600, 1010 and 1100 at the end of December 2008. You can find the announcement here.

Cheers!

Nortel VPN Router (Default Password)

0
January 19, 2008
by Michael McNamara in

The Nortel VPN (formerly Contivity) Routers are among some of the best in the industry. The majority of the product line came to Nortel (formerly Bay Networks) from the acquisition of New Oak back in 1999.

Since that time Nortel has added a few lower end SOHO solutions, Nortel VPN Router 200 series, to the product line which I believe are OEM’d from ZyXEL. I’m not very fond of the 200 series and I would NOT recommend them to anyone. I am, however, very fond of the 1100 series as it runs the same software that the larger models run.

Thankfully they all share the same default username and password. Unfortunately they don’t all share the same software or configuration interface.

The default username is “admin”.
The default password is “setup”.

With the traditional Nortel (Contivity Switches) VPN routers there are two internal IP addresses assigned to the one physical internal interface. One IP address is for management and the other for routing traffic. The default management IP address for these models (Nortel VPN Router 1000 Series, 2000 Series, 4000 Series, 5000 Series) is;

http://192.168.1.2

The actual traffic interface is 192.168.1.1 and the default DHCP address range should be between 192.168.1.3 – 192.168.1.254.

Cheers!

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