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Cisco is making it more difficult to use used hardware
- o-__-o 7y agoThe reason for this is counterfeit hardware. All nexus switches, APIC controllers, and UCS hw use TPM to validate software licensing. Invalid license, hardware is locked down. Witnessed this first hand on a bad APIC (ps call your favorite Cisco rep, they will hand out old ACI hardware like candy to a 3 year old) Back in the IOS days there were many stories of calling into smartnet and finding the hardware you bought new from CDW had a serial different from Cisco’s master list. Cisco would cut you off for fear of liability, the owner would dump the hw onto the used market and lather-rinse-repeat with another unsuspecting fowl.
- DangitBobby 7y agoWhy should it be possible for a third party to deactivate my hardware for any reason after I bought it?
- dalksfjid 7y agoBecause if a product comes new, and is used in an attack against a customer, Cisco could be found liable. Considering the high stakes implementations high end Cisco gear can be found in, this is not a small concern. Anyways, when you're buying hardware at this price point, you're not just paying for a box that moves packets.
- viraptor 7y agoI don't believe Cisco would be liable. Just like not a single manufacturer was liable for Mirai.
- bnjms 7y agoI don’t think we’re buying hardware anymore at this level. I think we’re buying software and support with hardware included. Not sure how I feel about this on all situations but I’d say that’s the only perspective the vendors can defend. It’s too bad for them too since eventually someone will build free software too.
- Silhouette 7y agoIt’s too bad for them too since eventually someone will build free software too. In many cases, they already are, though it's debatable whether it's ready to compete head-on with the major commercial offerings. You can buy white box switches and open software platforms to control them for SDN purposes right now, for example. But I'd say so far the main SDN suites haven't built up a great reputation and a lot of IT groups still prefer to source everything from one supplier with an expensive but all-encompassing support contract.
- topranks 7y agoYou can run commodity / white box switches in regular old mode, with routing protocols etc. Just because you have a Broadcom chip doesn’t mean you need to use some new-fangled centralized / crontroller based control plane.
- Silhouette 7y agoSure. My point was just that the more free/open alternatives to newer technologies in the industry aren't necessarily advanced enough yet to displace coughing up whatever it takes to buy big name brands and their big budget support contracts so everything comes from one place.
- dehrmann 7y agoA lot of this bad serial number hardware was built by the "night shift" at the same factory making the official hardware. These things just happen when you outsource.
- Proven 7y agoIt's not their job to make that easy. Their job is to serve their customers and those folks are not. They have no business relationship with the buyer of second hand Cisco gear. If you don't like it, but something else.
- esturk 7y agoI disagree because being able to resell will also factor into the first hand buyers expectation to recooperate values by selling it. If it is made known reselling is difficult then there will be diminished first hand buyers. So being able to resell is also a feature of a product.
- jdnenej 7y agoThe laws need to be changed to make this illegal. It's extremely damaging to the environment and should be banned.
- jacquesm 7y ago'Pre-owned' ? Second hand. All this whitewashing of terms is annoying. Just use the term that we all used to begin with.
- lisper 7y ago“Used.”
- dang 7y agoOk, we've used used above.
- imglorp 7y agoThe whole language irks me. "Entitlement" calls out the new idea that you are allowed to use your hardware or not. The whole point of license code is to prevent the thing from working in some cases. The last thing I want is another failure mode in my critical path.
- jacquesm 7y agoI have a nice stack of used routers and firewalls, cost a small fortune. Good luck on ever trusting those in a critical application, and by their very nature that's what they are for. So I can see some of the reasoning behind this, but once you have physical possession of a device it would be a relatively small affair to open it up, flip a jumper to 'yes I mean it' and then to be able to get it back to the same condition in which it left the factory. But since smartphones are mere terminals and computers are trending that way too it won't be long before a freely programmable computer will be a rarity. Software distribution is now centralized to the point that we have lost a lot compared to just two decades ago. Freeware and shareware would be unthinkable today, direct-to-the-user by virtue of downloading from the creator. App-stores and self-bricking hardware are the new normal.
- Thaxll 7y agomaster / slave ....
- kingosticks 7y agoMaybe I'm naive but I'm surprised to learn there is much of a 2nd hand market for 9000 series -class network hardware. I would have assumed that the huge complexity in managing a device like that without cisco support, alongside the difficulty in sourcing replacement parts for an EOL system built around redundancy, would make it very unattractive compared to a newer mid-range alternative. Are people really using unsupported hardware like this in their network?! Disclaimer: I work for Nokia, we also make big switches, I believe we have a similar licensing model for certain products.
- yusyusyus 7y agoI don't know which particular "9000 series" you're referring to, but C9K (which the article refers to) isn't EOL. It should be straightforward to get parts for these, via multiple channels. The deployment model for grey market bit is usually on networks that run on cheap models. They'll do things like buy one of the devices through white channel market and get SW access. Then, they'll turn around and buy a bunch more grey channel devices and use the SW access to upgrade, etc. As long as the device can handle the PPS and bitrates needed, its good enough for these networks. If it dies, buy another one and let it hang until it gets replaced. There are plenty of networks that just don't care about the operational issues.. and they love to keep cisco because of talent pipeline and training ecosystem. Anyway, running equipment without vendor support is fine. If its a config issue, the docs are okay. If it is a bug, 9 times out of 10 TAC throws a random bug ID and tells you to upgrade. Naturally, It becomes an issue more when you run on the periphery of what is supported.
- kingosticks 7y agoThe article talks about selling on hardware even once it's declared end of life and the article also gave the 9000 series as an example of hardware that requires a license. I assumed there was something similar going on already with the 9000's predecessor (the 8000?). I didn't mean to imply that the 9000 is already eol. It must be hell for these guys when they hit a show-stopper in old sw and they have no access to the fixed sw for their old hw.
- jimktrains2 7y ago
- zokier 7y agoIs this really any different from what MS does with Windows volume licensing? If you don't like the license model of IOS (etc), buy hardware that is supported by free/open source OS instead.
- naikrovek 7y agoYes, it is different, but it doesn't matter; comparison to another companies strategy does not negate the issue because comparison to another company does not change what Cisco is doing.
- soneil 7y agoI think to make that an apt comparison, you'd be buying hardware from Microsoft that only worked with Windows, and only with volume licences. So when sold second-hand they'd be essentially nonfunctional.
- ListenLinda 7y agoThis seems like a serious issue for the environment by forcing hardware into landfills. I wonder what the landscape is like in Europe for things like this. I know some countries are more diligent about physical products having a longer useful life than others.
- ianai 7y agoHere’s a thought: require such manufactures to completely recycle their discarded equipment. Suddenly reselling their ‘old’ equipment as refurbished at lower costs is a cost cutting option.
- Silhouette 7y agoThere already are quite strict rules along those lines in the EU. For example, here's the UK's interpretation: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/regulations-waste-electrical-and-electronic-equipment https://www.gov.uk/guidance/regulations-waste-electrical-and...
- jdnenej 7y agoHow does that work? Does the user have to pay to send it back to the manufacturer or does the user have to pay? If the user does I can see a lot of them throwing it in the bin because it's cheaper. Also recycling often means just melting down the metal case and binning all of the insides.
- ianai 7y agoYou can make a market of it. Make it possible to transfer the obligations of recycling to third parties with necessary oversight and assets necessary to do the job completely. The responsibility still stays with the manufacturer. etc. see the comment with a link
- throwaway2048 7y agoThen everything gets shipped off to some third world country to be burned or land filled via a company that has Certified Recycling(tm)
- oneplane 7y agoAll this is going to do is increase the efforts for open source switching firmware. We already have working data plane and control plane for selected systems, but at this point it no longer is some far fetched dream.
- dahfizz 7y agoIs this a firmware issue? It seems to be a change in the OS. Regardless, ONIE + ONOS has been an excellent choice for a while now.
- userbinator 7y agoIn the short term, it's also going to encourage people to just crack the protection (if it hasn't already been done).
- dehrmann 7y agoI used to work on drivers within IOS for a high-end switch. Between how complicated startup processes are, how specialized the hardware is, software workarounds for hardware issues, and the small demand for this, it doesn't seem likely. You're more likely to see Juniper take a different strategy to try to get more customers.
- snuxoll 7y agoJuniper is just as bad as Cisco when it comes to resold/gray-market gear, and I don’t see that changing. Sucks because I freaking love JunOS and it kicks the ass of anything Cisco has put out along with the myriad copycat designs from HPE/Arista/etc. I’m hoping someday cheap whitebox switches start entering the market, fs.com has a couple but they’re still out of reach for small shops and hobbyists compared to getting used gear off eBay.
- gumby 7y agoNetAPP has been the same way for decades: you can do what you want with the hardware but the licenses are nontransferable. Since I learned this in 2001 I have not bought any of their hardware.
- rbanffy 7y agoI'm sorry for companies that were planning on recovering part of their investment in Cisco hardware by reselling it a couple years down the road.
- twic 7y agoHow does the phoning home work if they're on a network that doesn't route to the internet, or where the route to the internet is heavily firewalled? Or does it use a license server? Or is there some other procedure for refreshing the license in that situation? Or can you just not use these routers for that?
- ethbro 7y agoTypically (a) they whitelist a route to the licensing servers (e.g. enterprise, "soft" disconnected) or (b) there's a manual, airgap tolerant authentication procedure that must be performed regularly (e.g. generate key from licensing servers, save, move across gap, upload to hardware). No idea what Cisco does specifically, but I've worked with other gear or software that worked like this.
- halbritt 7y agoOne pulls the key off the network element, plugs that into a website which produces an authorization key which can then be cut and pasted into the network element.
- mirceal 7y agojesus. in the age of cloud computing you copy/paste keys around :( this is just sad and makes me believe that you'd have to be borderline insane to choose cisco for anything that is started from scratch today.
- cesarb 7y agoThat sort of hardware can last forever. At a previous employer, we had in the office a second-hand Cisco Catalyst 3548XL switch (it still had an asset tag from the previous company the boss had founded). According to the Cisco documentation I looked at back then, not only was that model long out-of-life, but also its successor was long out-of-life. And other than a couple of dead ports, it still worked perfectly; it won't surprise me at all if it's still in use today.
- halbritt 7y agoI interacted with a company in Germany recently that still had 3548s in service. Not the XL model which was GigE, this was 10/100 only. The last order date for the OG 3548 was July 2002.
- noodlesUK 7y agoThis is extremely irritating. I have a fair amount of meraki hardware that was given to me as the reward for a hackathon, and I use it to run my home wifi networks. When the licenses expire the equipment will become completely useless and I’ll have to sell the perfectly functional stuff and replace it with unifi hardware...
- F_r_k 7y agoYou can still flash it, though
- EpicBlackCrayon 7y agoSome Meraki models support OpenWRT.
- halbritt 7y agoCisco has been fighting second hand sales of their hardware for well over two decades now. There was a flood of surplus gear after the first dotcom crash. Lots of folks, myself included took advantage of those circumstances. Eventually reputable vendors began to pop up. I recall doing a great deal of business (>$1m) with a company called "Network Hardware Resale". They're still in business as "Curvature" and I believe still moving second hand network and server gear as well as providing support. There have been times that I recall when lead times for Cisco gear have exceeded 8 weeks, when I didn't have any other options other than using refurbished gear. From my perspective, Cisco is nothing more than a company looking to extract as much money as possible out of Enterprise IT shops. They pretty much gave up the service provider market. IOS has gone a million different directions, and they've been slow to embrace IAC. Back when I was buying refurb gear, I was also buying some new and some officially re-marketed gear. I'd get support for the chassis and supervisor modules (Cat 6500) so that I could get reliable software updates. My sales rep's regional manager sent a threatening letter to the VP of my department with some dire warning about how we were in violation of the law or some such. We all ended up in a meeting in which they produced a list of serial numbers of gear that we'd sought support on that were supposedly grey-market. We produced the same list of serial numbers on invoices for legit Cisco certified re-marketed equipment. They'd just failed at record-keeping. My VP was livid and threw them out of his office. Pretty sure they got fired after. Anyway, this is all just a tactic to extract the most money possible. It'd be irrational to choose Cisco for any new network deployment these days.
- jimnotgym 7y ago> It'd be irrational to choose Cisco for any new network deployment these days I'm interested what you would buy instead? In the UK SME space I see mostly HP, Watchguard, Unifi. Lease lines still often come with Cisco gear (supplied by the provider). Otherwise I only see Cisco at the bigger entities.
- d00bianista 7y agoMikrotik has recently made bridging much saner, which makes their portfolio complete for datacenter use and pretty close on bridging users in the access layer. Their CCR-series is very much bang per buck if L4-filtering is enough, which should be enough in today's world of end-to-end encrypted communications. The CRS3xx-series as stated has become much saner with changes to bridging and with most features implemented are also worth the cost. The upside with affordable devices and the licensing model they have, make it possible to keep cold spares available in case of disaster. It does however make sense to study the management interfaces and disable all but SSH and HTTPS in order to minimize attack surface.
- chiph 7y ago> Those devices phone home to Cisco regularly for validation, and if they aren’t able to do so will go back to “Evaluation Mode” after one year. I'd like to see their salesperson try and explain the advantages of this to my CIO.
- mirceal 7y agoyou're put back to evaluation mode so that you can evaluate the choice you made when you picked them /s
- exabrial 7y agoSo basically Cisco is useless on airgapped networks now?
- exabrial 7y agoUbiquiti needs to invest in their router hardware team; golden opportunity in the market right now. Current gen of their routers are software based while even Cisco's SG3XX of routers have TCAM memory and can route at line speed. I really like their approach: cloud based but its your cloud and only if you want it.
- Ericson2314 7y agoThe argument for keeping Capitalism is that people like owning stuff and don't want to share their property. But capitalism itself is going concentrate ownership, removing it from the vast majority of people. At that point what's the point? Speaking of Cisco, if the Soviet Union lasted 10 more years, would we all have IPv6 by now? (Not to say that I want more Soviet Union.)
- segfaultbuserr 7y ago> Smart Licensing works differently. Companies can acquire a pool of licenses for their account, which are shared automatically among devices they’ve deployed. Those devices phone home to Cisco regularly for validation, and if they aren’t able to do so will go back to “Evaluation Mode” after one year. It doesn't sound unusual to me, I feel it's just the usual "Enterprise" bullshit, where you have little control or internal knowledge over your equipment, and must follow a restrictive licensing plan and use official support to keep it running. I think the most extreme version is the IBM mainframe computers, if you DRM license module is inoperative, the computer is essentially reduced to a huge piece of useless junk. Other enterprise hardware/software is not too restrictive, but still follows the same pattern, such as Oracle products.
- kazen44 7y agothe fact that devices need to phone home can be major issue, especially with networks not connected to the Internet. Also, degrading a device because of a license issue can become a huge liability. What if the smart licensing service has a technical error, and all switches in your datacenter go down because they no longer support the software features you require? From my experience with other datacenter network vendors, most seem to just do a vanity kind of licensing where they basically audit you every X years for licenses.
- Taniwha 7y agoThe article's "if you can't fix it you don't own it" needs to be a mantra that's repeated at politicians until we're blue in the faces
- londons_explore 7y agoBy having non-transferable licenses, Cisco will be able to differentiating pricing - ie. Governments pay extra, or non-profits get a discount.
- lazylizard 7y agoI can only hope that going forward we'll see less cisco stuff in datacenters.