It happend to me more than once, that i needed the basic parameters that were used during the initial setup of the Fabric. For example if you configure a standby APIC later on, or if you (for whatever reason) reset and APIC and redo the initial configuration dialog.

Of course, we always document everything we do, so we could simply look the information up in the documentation! But there is a faster way, just hop onto one of the APICs and use a small cat command.

1

cat /data/data_admin/sam_exported.config

This gives you back all the of the base parameters you used, during the initial setup.

 1
 2
 3
 4
 5
 6
 7
 8
 9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19

apic01# cat /data/data_admin/sam_exported.config
Setup for Active and Standby APIC

fabricDomain = DC
fabricID = 1
systemName = apic01
controllerID = 1
tepPool = 100.64.0.0/16
infraVlan = 3967
GIPo = 225.0.0.0/15
clusterSize = 3
standbyApic = NO
enableIPv4 = Y
enableIPv6 = N
firmwareVersion = 4.2(7f)
ifcIpAddr = 100.64.0.1
apicX = NO
podId = 1
oobIpAddr = 10.100.0.1/24

Afterword
My colleague Matthias (A daily reader of the blog), pointed out that the sam_exported.config is only present in newer version. If the command doesn’t work for you, check out the attached Technote from Cisco 🙂