T5140 ILOM reset

I recently acquired a SPARC Enterprise T5140 from eBay.

The seller didn't tell me the ILOM password, so getting it reset to defaults is the second order of business. First was getting the packing peanuts out of the chassis, removing tape residue, and placing it in the rack.

The ILOM in this machine has a embedded PowerPC MPC885ZPnn CPU and 128Mbytes of RAM. It has a serial port attached to the 8P8C modular connector on the back of the chassis. The pinouts for this connect are conveniently arranged to work with a common Cisco switch console cable. It's configured for 9600bps, 8 data bits, no stop bits, 1 parity bit. (9600 8n1) The ILOM runs Linux and is booted by u-boot.

To reset the ILOM's config, we need to interrupt its boot process. Before starting the Linux kernel, u-boot displays a message reading

Booting linux in 5 seconds...

When this is seen, interrupt the ILOM boot by sending xyzzy to it. No need for a newline character. This will get you a u-boot> prompt.

From here, the following command sequence will cause the ILOM to reset and restore its factory default configuration.

u-boot> setenv preserve_conf no
u-boot> saveenv
Saving Environment to Flash...
Un-Protected 1 sectors
Erasing Flash...
. done  
Erased 1/1 sectors
Writing to Flash... done
Protected 1 sectors
u-boot> reset

After the ILOM boots, it will be configured to acquire an IP address by DHCP and the default root password of changeme will be restored.