Cisco

Cisco ISR 4451 Serial Password Recovery

I had to password recover a Cisco ISR 4451, and kept having issues getting into the ROMMON prompt. Every guide mentioned sending a BREAK character during startup, but I could not get that to work. I was using the mini-USB port in the front, and as far as I knew did not have password recovery disabled. It turns out there is a problem with the mini-USB port and the Mac driver, I switched to using a traditional serial cable with a DB-9 connector/RJ45 serial port and suddenly I could get into ROMMON. I wanted to post incase anyone else runs into this.

Below is the startup process, at the end there you should be able to send a BREAK character.

Initializing Hardware ...

System integrity status: 00000610
Rom image verified correctly


System Bootstrap, Version 15.3(3r)S1, RELEASE SOFTWARE
Copyright (c) 1994-2013  by cisco Systems, Inc.

Current image running: Boot ROM0

Last reset cause: PowerOn
Cisco ISR4451-X/K9 platform with 4194304 Kbytes of main memory


Warning: filesystem is not clean
File size is 0x1d482044
Located isr4400-universalk9.03.16.04b.S.155-3.S4b-ext.SPA.bin 
<SEND BREAK HERE>

Summer 2012

The blog has been silent for a little while. I have been working at Cisco developing training software. Unfortunately the software is for internal use and at this time I am limited what I can say about it. But 3 months later and around 10,000 lines of code later I handed off the project to my coworkers.
Now back to school to continue studies, I think it is time for the Jukebox project to start up again. I have been researching libraries to use to play music and at this early point it may be the Mono version of XMA to play audio files. If anyone has any ideas for a java/mono/any Linux working library for mp3s that is easy pass it my way.