CISCO Easter Egg

Thu Oct 29 19:04:01 UTC 1998

> Not only interesting, but dishonest. 

Sometimes, honesty is not the best way to get a job done.  This is why
society functions best with a 'little white lie'.

> Forcing a company to spend money on false premise is tantamount to theft
> or conversion.  

I believe that there is some confusion here.  There was no money that
changed hands.  There was no requirement to upgrade imposed by Cisco.  The
conflict that Sean cites is wholly internal to the company running the
network.

If operations insists that a box not be rebooted even though the network is
not operational, that sometimes leaves the network engineer in a difficult
position: they can't repair the problem and they can't repair the problem.

At the same time, the command was installed so that Cisco could actually
test crash procedures.  [Yes, you do have to test them.  Yes, it helps if
there is a deterministic and constant way of testing them. ;-) ] Thus, from
Cisco's viewpoint, this was simply exposing an existing mechanism.

Tony