Recover Cyclades AlterPath ACS

For some reason I tend to break everything I get my hands on. Don’t worry, nothing major of course and your devices are safe with me, but I do like to break stuff.

Because OOB management is mandatory in a good management environment, I got my hands on a Cyclades AlterPath ACS32 console server. It was running an ancient firmware (september 2003)  and I searched for a new one online, downloaded it, set-up an FTP server, uploaded the new firmware and perfomed a reboot, as exepect the thing broke down. I hooked up a normal console cable and saw it kernel panicking. Because I didn’t see the bootloader I took it apart, removed the compact flash card, put it in my PC and found some kind of proprietary filesystem, no luck there.

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