Carrier Access Adit 600 – Reset to Factory Defaults

Carrier Access Adit 600
Carrier Access Adit 600

Today I ran into a password issue on a refurbished piece of telco equipment that I got for a great price at refurbphoneexchange.com, the Carrier Access Adit 600.

Just a little background info, these units are great for converting a couple of T1s from a Sangoma or Digium card in an Asterisk server for up to 48 FXS ports and are very solid performance wise. When compared to a Rhino box or other similar device that provide the same functionality, it’s like 1/5th of the cost. As far as I know, the only downside is that they are out of production and there is a limited number of units out there. Also, I haven’t been able to find any firmware updates anywhere for these units on the interweb. The company has been bought and sold so many times it is hard to keep track of who to call for support. It was Dell Force 10 Networks but now the current company that owns rights to the product is Telmar but I’m still having trouble finding answers to my questions.

Unfortunately, I called the company that I purchased the unit from, spoke to a person who said that they would have to do some digging and they never returned my phone call so I was up shit creek without a paddle. The previous owner had everything locked down, they even had a password on the console and obviously had changed the IP address on the management port to something other than the default so I had no way to access the unit or figuring out what the IP was. According to the manual, you’re supposed to be able to set the dipswitch labeled “RST” to the number one position and power cycle the unit to factory default the device but that doesn’t work if the previous owner issued the command “set local off” to disable the front panel.

Luckily, I stumbled upon this Asterisk mailing list that happened to have a working answer, well sort of. As this user mentioned below, this only works on units with newer firmware and I happened to have several older units and I haven’t been able to figure out the correct commands to turn debug mode on to erase the config. The only option left for these older units is to be forced to buy a support contract for all of the units you own through Telmar to gain access to the firmware upgrades. The current going rate for their most basic support package at the time of this writing is $90 per unit, which isn’t too terrible compared to some manufacturers.

Anyhow, to reset a newer unit, you will need a standard male to female RS232 cable and you can use the following settings on your favorite VTY terminal emulator: Baud Rate – 9600, Data Bits – 8, Parity – None, Stop Bits – 1, Flow Control – None.

***UPDATE*** I ended up paying support to gain access to the firmware updates and also found out how to turn on debug mode from the boot menu on the units that return this message “BOOT debug mode enabling requires keyword?”. Instead of just entering “1” as prescribed in the entry below, enter this exact phrase “1 cac74hik89”.

> Just noticed end of thread here. Not sure if it was mentioned but the
> newer - less than a few years - have a backdoor that works. Have not
> been able to get it to work on older units though. Here are my notes
> from the last time I tried - no warranties from me;)
>
> Obviously via a serial connection.
>
> PowerON
>
> Restoring "Factory" Defaults
>
> Stop the boot
> press 1 and enter
> type e db and enter
>
> BOOT [?,c,p,t,x,y,z]: 1
> BOOT debug ON
> BOOT [?,c,p,v,t,x,y,z,@]: e db
>  Preserving Mac= 0:e0:92:0:83:8
>  Flash Man=Atmel(1f) Dev-AT29LV010A(35) 8K Locks: Lo=NO(fe) Hi=NO(fe)
>  Erasing App DB…
>  Erase Done!
> BOOT [?,c,p,v,t,x,y,z,@]: 0
> BOOT debug OFF
> BOOT [?,c,p,t,x,y,z]: x
>
> Looking for valid application image in Flash…
>
> One Moment >>> Decompressing Image…
> Attached TCP/IP interface to cpm unit 0
> Attaching interface lo0…done
> System startup
> ERROR: Unable to recover db from flash.
>        Creating new flash image.
> CRC Error in OEM Data
>
> [……………………]
>
> Startup complete

 

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