8212zl GUI Vlans disappeared

[Ron Havlen]

I've had our 8212zl for several years, fully populated and powerful. Due to having to manage all servers, workstations, printers, networking, communications, etc., I do not have time to become completely fluent in the CLI. Therefore, most of my management of my switches (8212 and 2910al) is by GUI.

A couple years ago I upgraded the 8212 to the K15 version of firmware, which is quite different than the Java based K14 that I've kept on my 2910's, but I've gotten used to it. And manage the switch quite well with that GUI. I've updated  few more times since.

Up until about 2 months ago, I've been managing all my VLANS through this GUI as well, having around 10 Vlans at the time. The latest firmware at that time was K.15.14.007, which I've had in place for quite some time, at least 6 months prior. Suddenly, less than 2 months ago, with no changes other than adding about 12 Vlans (total count now is 26), I find I could no longer see or manage any vlans in the GUI. All are still managable via menu or cli, however the gui view and management is very important to us.

Today I updated the firmware to the latest available, K.15.16.0008. This made no difference in the VLAN view, no vlans are visible or manageable in the GUI. I had updated the firmware as I saw an HP release note that indicated previous firmware had an issue displaying if the "number" of vlans was more than 51. While I have less than that number, two vlans have ID's above 51. I had even tried removing those vlans previously to see if that had an affect, it did not.

Does anyone have any suggestions how I can get my VLAN view and management back in the GUI on my 8212zl?

[Vince-Whirlwind]

Get on the CLI and do a "show run" and what do you have for "web-management".

Are you using http or https to connect to the switch?

[Ron Havlen]

Thank you Vince. Interestingly, the CLI show run command gives me the running configuration, but does NOT show any line indicating web-management. I should at least see it on, without a no in front of it, as I can access via web management just fine. For everything except the vlan page display.

I do not have SSL setup on the unit, so use standard http. I have tried different browsers, IE, firefox and chrome, all with the same result. Different versions of IE produce nothing different.

All web manageable components are fully available, except for vlans. The vlan management page shows all the frames with field headers, but no data actually populates. I can go into port configuration, poe configuration, and do everything available in the gui. all other parts are available also, qos, spanning tree, etc. just not vlans.

[Vince-Whirlwind]

Try adding these to the cli to see if it makes a difference:

web-management plaintext

or

web-management ssl

[Ron Havlen]

I tried the web-management plainttext command. After that I then checked the gui and saw there was no difference. All parts of the gui show up except the vlan management.

I attempted the web-management ssl command, but I would have to obtain a certificate. It will be a long time before I could go through the processes to attempt that, even if I can make a self-signed one. I cannot purchase any, so that command is going to have to wait. They system will not go into ssl mode without a certificate.

[Vince-Whirlwind]

You can just tell the switch to generate a certificate.

It takes two lines:

crypto key generate cert 1024

crypto host-cert generate self-signed

[Ron Havlen]

Well, that was quite interesting. After following your advice and getting the self-signed certificate installed (successfully), I then connected using https to the switch. While the connection to the switch with https was successful and I logged in with admin credentials, there was no change in my Vlan managment page display. All other management pages display with data information, but no data populates the vlan page. All the headers are there, field names, such as ID, Vlan name, and so on. But no data.

Only on the Vlan management page.

[Vince-Whirlwind]

OK, so on the downside, your problem isn't solved.

On the upside, you can tell your boss you have implemented improved security on your network devices :)

Have you tried HP support? It doesn't seem like you have a configuration issue.