Cisco hardware question

gordon b slater gordslater at ieee.org
Fri Mar 5 00:50:43 UTC 2010


On Thu, 2010-03-04 at 19:16 -0500, Ricky Beam wrote:
> It's a DOS FAT  
> filesystem.

hmmmm. hmmmmmmmmmm. FAT.  Ah well, there must be a reason I guess.
Not exactly what I'd choose for a high security snort box ;) 
But, horses for courses I suppose.

Yes, as others say, good idea to check the s/n's with Cisco directly. 
You can _never_ be _too_ careful, both security-wise and financially.
It's not exactly a cheap piece of equipment, service contracts and
licences considered (and I don't mean the GPL one haha )

You can't rreally blame the frontline reps for not knowing what a fsck
is, its a new tech concept. Post-80's on fact. Oops, another boot-up un
in there, sorry.
Humour aside, in fairness, I'm not sure an average rep would know much
about QNX dumps either.

*nix-y stuff puts you very close to the hardware and architectures. You
see it all fly by in the logs and dmesg. Companies like cisco probably
like to keep you at arms length from it.

In this case you don't see the hardware so much but you "see" the bottom
line of the invoice. That gives you all the right in the world to ask
deep probing questions whenever you find things like this. A good
manufacturer and supplier will answer them fully, though it may take
some time to find the right clued-up tech internally.  

eg: Until you use ZFS you'd never believe the error rates on seemingly
good hard drive systems, especially through "high-end" kit with
supposedly safe "error correction". What you don't see doesn't worry
you. 

Gord
--
oink. oink. alert. oink. snort







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