Oh the joys of hands on cisco work...a random post

So, I had to be the one to say this morning "I haven't even thought about cisco for like 2 weeks...it's been a great break". For those not keeping track (mostly everyone), I attained my CCNA a month ago or so, and began towards my BSCI, when I decided to wait until I return home from my 15 month deployment to Iraq. We are going home in a couple of months, so I'm concentrating on that. Plus, having just turned 21..I am on the right track, I think.

So, hours after telling a buddy that I was glad to have a break from studying cisco- we had a router freeze up in our system. Went to check it out, and immediately diagnosed the router as having taken a crap on itself. Came back to the shop, hunted down a 2600 to replace it with- went to another 2600 in system, copied the image (since the replacement 2600 had the c2600-i-mz image, not the image we needed-i-mz doesn't support IPSec), went back, threw it on the 2600, only to discover- lack of memory. I knew I should have checked before hand...ended up running Xmodem to put the old image off yet another 2600, to get it functional again.

In the meanwhile, ran down to the bad router, pulled the flash, brought it back to transplant into the now frankenstein-like 2600...and here I wait for the Xmodem to complete the 5meg transfer.

All I gotta say is..what a day...god I love this job...can't wait to do it as a civilian

Just felt like speaking my mind. Can't wait to get back to hawaii and resume my studying, I feel real
lazy.

Anyone else have days like this where it seems in order to get problem A fixed, you have to go through an obstacle B..which cannot be done until obstacle C is finished..and so on? It's a pain but makes you feel as if you've earned your pay well. Almost home..

mike

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Comments

faa067

I know the feeling exactly. I call it "wading deeper into the marsh".
At some point you have to stop and think: "Why am trying to Fix C? What got me started down this path?" My god how did I get here?

You gotta love IT work...

Francois

garv221

I have had a lot of obstacles and hoops to jump through. I direct an all Cisco network w/2500 users, 160 VLANS, countless 2950's, PIXs, bandwidth shaping, 4000 series & some other stuff

. It use to to frustrate me when a simple fix would take all day but it happens & it's good experience.

Thanks Mike for the hard work in Iraq and congrats on coming home buddy.

Mrock4

Well, 9 hours after the issue started, it's fixed..at least for now. It's not the optimal solution, but hey- it works. Our voice and data traffic travel over a line of sight shot we have, which we weren't able to get worked in, but it is still traveling over our backup link for now. Better than nothing, right? The router I was working on when posting this ended up working..it seemed to be a problem of a loop of some sort, instead of the router..at least this is my thinking. We kept getting the router to freeze up from the CLI, and then un-freeze once unplugging our LOS..so that kind of leaves some thought. I did come up with the initial fix though, which at least allowed our backup link to come in. It's a good feeling. A long day, but fufilling.

faa067- I will admit, I was sitting there using Xmodem to put an old image onto a beatup 2600..waiting an hour and a half for 5 megs to transfer..thinking- "what the hell am I doing? even if this old image works, I still have to transfer all the old DRAM and Flash over to this router, and put the new image over it". It all worked out though so...yay.

garv- thanks for the kind words. I really appreciate them. It'll be great to spend this christmas in the states.

Ahriakin

Just a small (okay maybe pedantic) observation. 1.5 hours for 5Mb is a lot, did you boost the serial speed to 115Kbps from 9600 before doing the transfer? I setup a lab with some 2620s a couple of months back and ran into exactly the same issues with images and flash/ram size and had to reflash some of the units many times, this was a major time saver. Essentially in Rommon mode run Confreg on it's own, it'll take yo through a short wizard that allows you to increase the baud rate, full instructions - http://www.cisco.com/warp/public/130/xmodem_generic.html#download_2620

Mrock4

Yes, I upped the baud rate...option # 7 on the menu. It was alright, considering I was on a 12 hour shift anyways..still had a few hours till I got off anyways.