Cisco 7200 series and G2 NPEs

Mon Jul 16 05:02:30 UTC 2007

At 11:29 PM 7/15/2007, Steven Haigh wrote:
>I'm wondering if there is anyone willing to share any experiences they
>have had with Cisco 7200 series equipment (specifically relating to
>the G2 NPE) and any 12.4 based IOS.
>
>We were initially advised by Cisco to run 12.4(4)-XD7, however upon
>introducing our first G2 into the network, the vpdn target routers had
>a ~20% CPU usage increase, while the G2 itself showed signs of
>incorrectly establishing tunnels. Changing back to a G1 NPE (same
>config) and everything works as expected.

It didn't seem quite right to us either.

>Cisco has recommended that we move to a 12.2 SB IOS for the G2,
>however I'm wondering what other people are doing.

We are running 12.2(31)SB5 and we have been very pleased. We are 
using MPLS, BGP, ISIS, CEF, SNMP, and TACACS+ with I/O-2FE,  3 GE 
fiber SFPs, PA-MC-T3s, and PA-FEs.

>On another note, it seems as though it is not possible to recover a G2
>from a rommon state with invalid bootloader images or corrupt
>bootflash:. There are no commands in the rommon to allow Xmodem
>uploads via the console, nor any networking functions. I also noticed
>that it seems to be impossible to load the bootloader from a CF card -
>even though you can list the contents of the CF card.
>
>Does anyone have any recovery techniques that I'm not aware about in a
>real world failure scenario?

That sounds disturbing. I can't imagine they would not have a way to 
recover using TFTP or flash.

-Robert

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