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Cisco VXC-2212: Firmware 

BIOS

The VXC-2212 has a Phoenix BIOS. Hit the DEL key on power-up to enter the setup screens. It identifies itself as "Phoenix MicroCore Setup Utility". The BIOS version in my unit was 0.3C-0407 dated 02/23/11.

The default password for the BIOS is Fireport.

The Main screen showed 256MB of RAM installed, but checking the Advanced tab showed that the video Frame Buffer Size was set to 256MB. (If you've apparently lost memory that's where it has gone). This can set to 64/128/256/512MB.

This screen also had a setting to allow Headless Boot. (i.e. It won't halt if there is no keyboard present).

The Power Management tab lets you define how the unit behaves when power is switched on (restored). Essentially the options are off/on/last state.

The Boot Device tab lets you play with the boot priority. I plugged in a 1GB generic USB flash drive with Tiny Core Linux and moved that option to the top of the list. Having done this the screen showed:

  1. USB Flash Device: Generic Flash Disk- (USB2
  2. IDE Hard Disk Drive(IDE Flash) 128MB ATA Fl
  3. Network Boot: VIA Networking Bootagent
  4. USB Hard Disk Drive:
  5. USB Floppy Disk Drive:
  6. USB CD-ROM Drive:

Booting

I found some strange behaviour here.

With the standard Cisco firmware in place, having been into the BIOS and set the USB device as the first boot device it quite happily booted from that. However if I turned the power off and back on I almost immediately got a screen saying: "Waiting for network link" and it ended up booting into its own operating system.

Pressing the DEL key at this point seemed to abort things and it rebooted, this time booting from the USB drive.

I removed the Cisco Flash module and replaced it with a 512MB part intending to install Tiny Core onto that. This time the system powered up with apparently USB ports 3 and 4 disabled. i.e to boot from the pen drive I had to have the pen drive plugged into either port 1 or 2. I also had to make the choice of whether I wanted a working keyboard or a working mouse! The alternative is to install Tiny Core onto the flash on another machine and then transfer it across.

Native Firmware

The VXC-2212 runs proprietary Cisco Software - The Cisco Virtualization Experience Client(?).

Mine was running version 7.0_213. The latest on Cisco's website is 8.0.215. To be able to download it you need a Cisco Service Contract.

 


Any comments? email me. Added April 2016