This Bizzarre Adventure requires a bit of context:
Earlier in the week the boys and I were doing labs. It was me, Trithis, and kelvinpw (the guy who tossed the PowerEdge at me in the PowerEdge Crusade). We were all in front of our console windows about to finish cleanup of the labs we finished. When we finished cleanup, we reloaded the switches to make sure they're good. kelvin and Trithis.... they nuked their Cisco IOS (the operating system image). Me? I actually did it right. How ironic that I actually did it right! Anyway, we left it there until now, when we went to reload these switches.
So the first part was rather easy and went without problems: copy the working IOS from my switch onto a surrogate TFTP server (because regular FTP is crap according to Cisco). The next parts were.... slow, to say the least:
If you couldn't tell, switches needed to use XMODEM of all things in the recovery mode. Which if you're familiar with serial anything, is really.... really.... slow. That is, until kelvin found out how to speed up the baud rate, which effectively turned up the speed:
Much better. Now if only Trithis and kelvin didn't nuke IOS to begin with. Or Cisco should have a LARGE ASCII ART WARNING saying YOUR IOS WILL BE LOST!
Or something....