companies buying cisco stuff

aueddonline

I bought a router off ebay the other day a 3640 and I did a password recovery on it and copied the cofig file into running config and it turned ou that the router had come from BT, massive company in the UK, it had BGP running with 1 neighbor configured on there and it got me thinking.

How offten do these big companies upgrade their stuff? how old is some of the stuff still being used on the internet and now IPv6 is in the picture would there be like a boom in cisco sales with people having to upgrade their kit?

dtlokee

The 3640 was most likely a customer edge router that may have been located at the customer site and the customer sold it, not BT. There are some ISP's in the world still using 2500's and 4000/4500/4700's on their networks. As long as it gets the job done I guess.

aueddonline

oh right, i guess it's only got one neighbor, I was thinking come on guys where's the redundancy

aueddonline

The key word being managed I suppose

banner motd ^CC
British Telecommunications plc

WARNING You have accessed a computer managed by BT. You are required to
have authorisation from BT before you proceed and you are strictly limited
to the use set out within that authorisation. Unauthorised access to or
misuse of this system is prohibited and constitutes an offence under the
Computer Misuse Act 1990.

If you disclose any information obtained through this system without
authority BT may take legal action against you.

If you are authorised to use this computer enter your authentication details,
otherwise terminate this connection now.

This device is now Authenticating, Authorising and Accounting via the DMAS
servers. Please use your DMAS userID and password to gain access to this
device. If you encounter any problems, please go to

GT-Rob

some companies upgrade constantly, some never do.


For example, there are 2 networks I am into every day at work. Both companies are billion dollar, international companies with 1000+ device networks. One of them, still uses 1900 switches all of the place. The other, has 6509s at the access layer lol.

It all depends on their budget. A lot of places will go by the "if it ain't broken, don't fix it", while others, reliability must be 100%, 100% of the time, so (tested) upgrades happen all the time.


I do find it odd that they leave the config on the device. All my ebay stuff was the same. Considering how many background checks I had to go through for me job, im a little offended! :P

aueddonline

what is the worst thing you could do with a config file? There is a load of hash values on here which could be decrypted but i'm guessing you would still have to be in the branch office to get a neighbor relationship going and that's relying on them not changing the password


just out of interest, not planning anything illegal all the nearly all the routers I bought have had some sort of config file on, normally not that interesting though, that's the first router with BGP configured i've seen.

Oh get this did the loading flash from rommon mode on this router, how slow, used the xmodem command and got it transfering over the console cable at 1k ! 3 hours ! for a tiny tiny file

GT-Rob

xmodem will make you hate life lol


Theres nothing you can really do with most config files, but its still a matter of security. Say you wanted to break into X company's network, and bought one of their routers with a config on it still. You now could know the IP address structure, what IPs are restricted (and which are not), managment IPs, vlan info, maybe some passwords (probably not), and weaknesses.

I don't know, it takes 5 seconds to whipe a config out, and with how tight security is in major networks, I am really surprised to see them out in the open.

GT-Rob

And also from what I have seen, almost all major networks use TACACs authentication anyway, other than the odd remote sites, so there wouldn't be any passwords to decrypt on the config.

kryolla

Thats the fun part of getting a router from ebay. Password recovery and seeing what other company configs look like.