9 ms·

Dump these small-biz routers, says Cisco, we won't patch their flawed VPN

59 points by sorenjan 4y ago

xani_ 4y ago
scratches off Cisco from vendor list "Oh, that's not what you meant ? Well, the others are cheaper so byebye anyway"
- bluedino 4y ago
  Cisco's small business line is overpriced junk anyway. The Cisco name is supposed to make you feel better, or something.
  - RajT88 4y ago
    Yep. I quit buying Cisco small business stuff 13 years back. They have done many things more egregious than this.
  - wongarsu 4y ago
    Apparently Cisco's great if you deploy a couple of them, everything working seamlessly together with one management software. If you pony up for their licenses that is. For anything smaller that doesn't need that, I don't see the point in buying (new) Cisco hardware.
    - olyjohn 4y ago
      > Apparently Cisco's great if you deploy a couple of them, everything working seamlessly together with one management software. This is what all the vendors say about their stuff.
- sigio 4y ago
  For small-office and home use I only use routers that run OpenWRT, at least there you can always get fixes, and it runs a very plain linux system. Current favourites are tplink-archer-c7, edgerouter-x, asus rt-ac85p ... all of these retail for about $60 and are more then capable enough to route a gigabit at linerate and do stuff like wireguard.
  - somat 4y ago
    I think the main thing is to have your router software vendor be different than your router hardware vendor. My current favorite small business router is the pcengines apu2 family. I run openbsd on them. but really it could be anything. great little boxes.
- numpad0 4y ago
  These are basically branded swags. I wouldn’t expect Boeing keychain from their company store to have gone through Boeing engineering process and quality control, same deal but it happens that with electronics manufacturers, some souvenir grade items assume the same role as regular products.
nigma1337 4y ago
I mean, isn't it quite reasonable to not update something post-EOL ? (router EOL of 5 years seems a bit short though)
- twawaaay 4y ago
  But that's the whole point. Imagine you have to throw out your car after 5 years because the manufacturer stopped updating the software. We are getting there. 5 years is not nice. A large, established company like Cisco, selling devices in an established and very slowly evolving market like routers to companies, should be offering much longer support periods. Apple supports iPhones for 7 years which I still think is not enough. I think routers for small businesses should be supported for at least double that. There is physically nothing wrong with these routers. They are perfectly capable doing their job from every possible angle. This is just generating garbage so that Cisco can sell more new hardware that is performing basically the same job.
  - ThreePinkApples 4y ago
    > Apple supports iPhones for 7 years That's 7 years from launch, not 7 years from end of sale. Not defending Cisco here, but looking up the RV110W I can find documents for it dating back to 2011, so that's 11 years of support. For the RV130 I can find an administrators guide that was revised in Aug 2014, so at least 8 years there. probably more given that it's a revision.
    - twawaaay 4y ago
      It is irrelevant. Using your argument, you could stop all support right after the devices stopped being sold. So it was being sold for 15 years and the software has been in support for 15 years and it is old so we stop selling it and supporting it at the same time. Now hope you are not the person who bought it on the last day...
  - wccrawford 4y ago
    First off, I think this is awful of Cisco, and definitely harms their brand in my opinion. I already didn't think well of them for low-end stuff, though, so it's not like they could do much damage there. However, this isn't killing the entire router. Just the VPN functionality. If you don't use that, there's no need to get rid of the router. Just make sure the VPN is disabled, as per the article. If you do use the VPN, then you should either replace the router or implement the VPN differently. Second-hand, that router is still good for anyone that doesn't need a VPN. When tech is moving fast, I can understand a short warranty, but I don't think routers are in that category. (Wifi routers are, but I've yet to have a Wifi router that could handle my residential usage of it anyhow. They always end up having problems. I've moved to having an access point separately from a router so at least it doesn't kill the whole network when it gets stupid.)
Arnt 4y ago
EOL today for routers sold in 2017 is harsh. EOLing a laptop that's hauled around is one thing, or a server with a CPU that's configured to run at the limit of what its cooling system supports. But routers are little boxes that run at very conservative clock speeds and a correspondingly high MTBF, are never moved, never reconfigured, never given new software to run, and to which its users hardly ever pay attention. Five years is unreasonably short for that kind of device.
- orangepurple 4y ago
  How else is the Cisco executive team supposed to get paid?
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
  Routers also tend to be used by small businesses that stick them in a closet and forget they exist, or large businesses that can't afford the downtime of replacing the whole stack. I suspect a lifetime of 5 years is actually on the low end.
  - Arnt 4y ago
    That's more or less what I tried to say. Assuming a five-year lifetime shows a lack of knowledge of how the product is typically used. Incidentally, my own upstream uses a twelve-year-old router. I know where it is but I'm not sure that cupboard has been opened this year.
    - illiac786 4y ago
      >Assuming a five-year lifetime shows a lack of knowledge of how the product is typically used. a five-year lifetime is is business decision balancing customer expectations and maintenance cost (including keeps a hardware stock of these routers in each continent, sometime even in country for specific countries, keep development alive, etc.). You may say they underestimate the willingness of their customer to buy a new router after 5 years, but they definitely know that a huge proportion of their customers are running woefully out-of-date and unsupported hardware/software. Same for all on-prem vendors and a major reason why moving customers to cloud is so appealing for so many vendors.
woliveirajr 4y ago
After the EOL all companies should make the {thing} open : release all keys, software, backdoors, whatever. No more copywrite, IP, on it. So that any user could install anything they wanted and use it as they wish. Including replace components with similars and/or make modifications.
- White_Wolf 4y ago
  This should be mandatory for any product/software that becomes EOL with no exception.
  - denton-scratch 4y ago
    Strikes me it's probably impossible. Cisco is presumably bound by all kinds of tech cross-licensing deals, and can't just open up schematics, source etc.
    - b112 4y ago
      If it was law, everyone, not just Cisco, would negotiate cross-licensing deals as such. As a result, there would be no way for people to license IP unless they allowed for open use after the fact. Beyond that, as an example, open apis (for drivers re:hardwwre) are not the same as giving full chip scematics. But! If the, for example, SoC stopped updating binary blobs, and things stopped working with newer kernels, as an example, then they'd have to 100% open up and provide sources. People get all rah-rah about the environment, but I throw away pounds and pounds of highly polluting electronics, just so someone can sell me another. This model need to stop.
    - ticviking 4y ago
      If we required it as a matter of law I hope that my property interest in the actual hardware combined with a statute outweighs those licensing deals.
- carlmr 4y ago
  >After the EOL all companies should make the {thing} open : release all keys, software, backdoors, whatever. No more copywrite, IP, on it. I think this is reasonable. It's unreasonable to expect companies to support old products indefinitely, otherwise they would collapse under the weight of the legacy. It's also unreasonable to leave customers that bought something, however old, with nothing to fix it themselves. Ideally also the companies would have to release all this at least a year before EOL for people to be able to get acquainted with the codebase.
numpad0 4y ago
From the article, affected models are: RV110W, RV130, RV130W, RV215W. Cisco branded, but appears not what an network engineer might consider as such; these are Linux-based routers. Cisco routers and switches are based on their proprietary chipset and proprietary IOS/IOS-XR/IOS-XE/NX-OS operating system. Without it, I would rather pick ASUS or anyone else.
brnt 4y ago
Protip: buy a router that has good openwrt (et al) support. Your hardware will live a longer and more fulfilling life!
- tucosan 4y ago
  Open source OS should be the industry standard for network hardware.
- cesarb 4y ago
  And make sure it has at least 16MB of flash and 128MB of RAM, if you really want it to have a long life. See https://openwrt.org/supported_devices/864_warning https://openwrt.org/supported_devices/864_warning for details.
- andreareina 4y ago
  They're becoming rarer and rarer. Bought a router three years ago, could only find one model sold locally that had openwrt support. Except for the latest revision, which of course is all that was available.
  - thrtythreeforty 4y ago
    There's tons of perfectly functional corporate e-waste on eBay that supports openwrt, especially cloud-managed crap like Meraki that was junk when it was new. Nobody has any use for out-of-support routers, so really nice hardware (PoE, Wi-Fi 6, etc) can be had for $20 and an hour of pwning the stock image. I hate on Meraki so much because it's the epitome of something that doesn't need to be a paid subscription except for juicing customers (the hardware is great). Ubiquiti does cloud-managed the right way; you can self host and the hardware isn't bricked if you let maintenance lapse.
nerdponx 4y ago
I'm lately finding it hard to convince myself that there is a not a global conspiracy among large corporations to implement the "you will own nothing" directive by means of a ratcheting system. One big company rolls out an anti-consumer, anti-ownership, anti-freedom policy. People get annoyed and some small subset of customers leave, while the rest maybe grumble but stay. Then the next-biggest companies see that the big player is still doing fine with their anti-consumer policy, so they get a little greedy and start doing it too. Then all of a sudden it's a new industry standard, and consumers who value their own freedom find themselves rapidly running out of alternatives. Maybe if outcry gets really bad, the big corp need to roll back the decision, and either wait for a different opportunity, or let another corporation take the lead, or change the type of policy to be more subtle. My personal system for evaluating a conspiracy theory is: 1) how big is the payoff? 2) how hard is it to execute? 3) how hard is it to keep secret? 4) how many people need to be involved? This scenario passes all 4 criteria with flying colors. 1) The payoff is absolutely enormous. 2) It would be relatively easy for the same people who would be most strongly motivated to do this. 3) It should be easy set up a communication system that maintains almost total plausible deniability against collusion, because it actually only requires minimal knowledge of and cooperation between participants and their plans. Just a few meetings among subgroups of participants, and more head nods than spoken words. During the process, active communication can be reduced to basically zero. 4) Very few. Most corporate decision makers at most companies wouldn't have to know, they'll be able to see where things are headed and follow along. In general, the only holdouts will be HN poster types with small businesses that serve only tiny fractions of the market.
- bombcar 4y ago
  It’s even scarier - you don’t need any conspiracy or communication at all - companies trying to move to “aaS” models with subscriptions will naturally cause this with no collusion at all.
  - MyBallsAreSexy 4y ago
    You can't even really own your computer anymore if you're a windows user. The entire operating system is "as a service" and windows 11 makes that even more true.
pessimizer 4y ago
They shouldn't be expected to update these for as long as they're useful. They should be required to open up the hardware if they refuse to update the software. That should be the rule: you get to pretend that locking people out of the hardware is for their own good as long as you continue to update their software for free. You can't just be allowed to arbitrarily EOL perfectly functional hardware.
- ElCheapo 4y ago
  In all fairness, as longs as patents exist you simply can't "open up" a piece of technology. What you can do is reverse engineer it, since it's allowed becausenof the manufacturer's drop of support
  - causi 4y ago
    In all fairness, as longs as patents exist you simply can't "open up" a piece of technology That's not true at all. Divulging data without offering license terms does nothing to hurt your ability to enforce intellectual property rights. The people using that data just do so knowing they're technically breaking the law. Patents are not trademarks.
  - wongarsu 4y ago
    Unlike trademarks, you can selectively enforce patents without risking them. And in a way, the patent system is exactly about "opening up" technology. After all the idea of a patent is "you tell everyone how to build it, in return nobody is allowed to use that knowledge commercially for X years unless you allow it. This aligns great with "give us the tools to modify the software of hardware you find commercially unattractive".
    - nrclark 4y ago
      I realize that is a bit of a topic change, but do you think that ideal reflects the reality of patents today? I've read a lot of modern patents, and not one of them was written to convey useful information. They're all dense legal writing, and as vague as the author can get away with. Most medium/big companies have patent attorneys whose entire job is writing patents. They don't care about the patents having any useful details to make it a useful reference. Usually the attorneys aren't subject experts on the patent topic, and couldn't make it accurate even if they tried. Modern patents are a game where you file a whole bunch and then wait for somebody to step on one by accident with a parallel invention. Then you sue them unless they have enough patents to also sue you. Patents don't promote innovation at all, at least not any more. If anything, they're a tax on our industry and they stifle small players - exactly the sort of person who they're supposed to help.
cesarb 4y ago
Networking hardware has a very long life. At a previous company, we used in the office as the center of the LAN a switch (Cisco Catalyst 3548 XL) which was already past EOL. In fact, it was so long past EOL that the switch model which replaced that model was also already past EOL. And yet, it worked perfectly (other than a couple of failed ports), and we probably used less than a tenth of its capabilities. I wouldn't be surprised if that same switch is still working today; the main reason to replace it would be that it only has Fast Ethernet (100baseTX), instead of the current mainstream default of Gigabit Ethernet (1000baseT).
Intermernet 4y ago
Many years ago I reported a bug with Cisco ios routers where the default admin login worked in the sdm web gui even after the account was deleted. I received no acknowledgement that the problem existed. After paying the support subscription, a year later the problem was silently resolved. I lost all trust in Cisco after that.
lizardactivist 4y ago
Some of these security issues really look like backdoors.. very odd
shrubble 4y ago
Cisco's Meraki line is explicitly designed to not pass traffic after the license/entitlement expires. That neans that an expensive 24 port managed switch for example, will brick itself after 7-10 years of life.

59 points by sorenjan 4y ago

xani_ 4y ago

scratches off Cisco from vendor list "Oh, that's not what you meant ? Well, the others are cheaper so byebye anyway"

bluedino 4y ago
Cisco's small business line is overpriced junk anyway. The Cisco name is supposed to make you feel better, or something.
- RajT88 4y ago
  Yep. I quit buying Cisco small business stuff 13 years back. They have done many things more egregious than this.
- wongarsu 4y ago
  Apparently Cisco's great if you deploy a couple of them, everything working seamlessly together with one management software. If you pony up for their licenses that is. For anything smaller that doesn't need that, I don't see the point in buying (new) Cisco hardware.
  - olyjohn 4y ago
    > Apparently Cisco's great if you deploy a couple of them, everything working seamlessly together with one management software. This is what all the vendors say about their stuff.
sigio 4y ago
For small-office and home use I only use routers that run OpenWRT, at least there you can always get fixes, and it runs a very plain linux system. Current favourites are tplink-archer-c7, edgerouter-x, asus rt-ac85p ... all of these retail for about $60 and are more then capable enough to route a gigabit at linerate and do stuff like wireguard.
- somat 4y ago
  I think the main thing is to have your router software vendor be different than your router hardware vendor. My current favorite small business router is the pcengines apu2 family. I run openbsd on them. but really it could be anything. great little boxes.
numpad0 4y ago
These are basically branded swags. I wouldn’t expect Boeing keychain from their company store to have gone through Boeing engineering process and quality control, same deal but it happens that with electronics manufacturers, some souvenir grade items assume the same role as regular products.

nigma1337 4y ago

I mean, isn't it quite reasonable to not update something post-EOL ? (router EOL of 5 years seems a bit short though)

twawaaay 4y ago
But that's the whole point. Imagine you have to throw out your car after 5 years because the manufacturer stopped updating the software. We are getting there. 5 years is not nice. A large, established company like Cisco, selling devices in an established and very slowly evolving market like routers to companies, should be offering much longer support periods. Apple supports iPhones for 7 years which I still think is not enough. I think routers for small businesses should be supported for at least double that. There is physically nothing wrong with these routers. They are perfectly capable doing their job from every possible angle. This is just generating garbage so that Cisco can sell more new hardware that is performing basically the same job.
- ThreePinkApples 4y ago
  > Apple supports iPhones for 7 years That's 7 years from launch, not 7 years from end of sale. Not defending Cisco here, but looking up the RV110W I can find documents for it dating back to 2011, so that's 11 years of support. For the RV130 I can find an administrators guide that was revised in Aug 2014, so at least 8 years there. probably more given that it's a revision.
  - twawaaay 4y ago
    It is irrelevant. Using your argument, you could stop all support right after the devices stopped being sold. So it was being sold for 15 years and the software has been in support for 15 years and it is old so we stop selling it and supporting it at the same time. Now hope you are not the person who bought it on the last day...
- wccrawford 4y ago
  First off, I think this is awful of Cisco, and definitely harms their brand in my opinion. I already didn't think well of them for low-end stuff, though, so it's not like they could do much damage there. However, this isn't killing the entire router. Just the VPN functionality. If you don't use that, there's no need to get rid of the router. Just make sure the VPN is disabled, as per the article. If you do use the VPN, then you should either replace the router or implement the VPN differently. Second-hand, that router is still good for anyone that doesn't need a VPN. When tech is moving fast, I can understand a short warranty, but I don't think routers are in that category. (Wifi routers are, but I've yet to have a Wifi router that could handle my residential usage of it anyhow. They always end up having problems. I've moved to having an access point separately from a router so at least it doesn't kill the whole network when it gets stupid.)

Arnt 4y ago

EOL today for routers sold in 2017 is harsh. EOLing a laptop that's hauled around is one thing, or a server with a CPU that's configured to run at the limit of what its cooling system supports. But routers are little boxes that run at very conservative clock speeds and a correspondingly high MTBF, are never moved, never reconfigured, never given new software to run, and to which its users hardly ever pay attention. Five years is unreasonably short for that kind of device.

orangepurple 4y ago
How else is the Cisco executive team supposed to get paid?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
Routers also tend to be used by small businesses that stick them in a closet and forget they exist, or large businesses that can't afford the downtime of replacing the whole stack. I suspect a lifetime of 5 years is actually on the low end.
- Arnt 4y ago
  That's more or less what I tried to say. Assuming a five-year lifetime shows a lack of knowledge of how the product is typically used. Incidentally, my own upstream uses a twelve-year-old router. I know where it is but I'm not sure that cupboard has been opened this year.
  - illiac786 4y ago
    >Assuming a five-year lifetime shows a lack of knowledge of how the product is typically used. a five-year lifetime is is business decision balancing customer expectations and maintenance cost (including keeps a hardware stock of these routers in each continent, sometime even in country for specific countries, keep development alive, etc.). You may say they underestimate the willingness of their customer to buy a new router after 5 years, but they definitely know that a huge proportion of their customers are running woefully out-of-date and unsupported hardware/software. Same for all on-prem vendors and a major reason why moving customers to cloud is so appealing for so many vendors.

woliveirajr 4y ago

After the EOL all companies should make the {thing} open : release all keys, software, backdoors, whatever. No more copywrite, IP, on it. So that any user could install anything they wanted and use it as they wish. Including replace components with similars and/or make modifications.

White_Wolf 4y ago
This should be mandatory for any product/software that becomes EOL with no exception.
- denton-scratch 4y ago
  Strikes me it's probably impossible. Cisco is presumably bound by all kinds of tech cross-licensing deals, and can't just open up schematics, source etc.
  - b112 4y ago
    If it was law, everyone, not just Cisco, would negotiate cross-licensing deals as such. As a result, there would be no way for people to license IP unless they allowed for open use after the fact. Beyond that, as an example, open apis (for drivers re:hardwwre) are not the same as giving full chip scematics. But! If the, for example, SoC stopped updating binary blobs, and things stopped working with newer kernels, as an example, then they'd have to 100% open up and provide sources. People get all rah-rah about the environment, but I throw away pounds and pounds of highly polluting electronics, just so someone can sell me another. This model need to stop.
  - ticviking 4y ago
    If we required it as a matter of law I hope that my property interest in the actual hardware combined with a statute outweighs those licensing deals.
carlmr 4y ago
>After the EOL all companies should make the {thing} open : release all keys, software, backdoors, whatever. No more copywrite, IP, on it. I think this is reasonable. It's unreasonable to expect companies to support old products indefinitely, otherwise they would collapse under the weight of the legacy. It's also unreasonable to leave customers that bought something, however old, with nothing to fix it themselves. Ideally also the companies would have to release all this at least a year before EOL for people to be able to get acquainted with the codebase.

numpad0 4y ago

From the article, affected models are: RV110W, RV130, RV130W, RV215W. Cisco branded, but appears not what an network engineer might consider as such; these are Linux-based routers. Cisco routers and switches are based on their proprietary chipset and proprietary IOS/IOS-XR/IOS-XE/NX-OS operating system. Without it, I would rather pick ASUS or anyone else.

brnt 4y ago

Protip: buy a router that has good openwrt (et al) support. Your hardware will live a longer and more fulfilling life!

tucosan 4y ago
Open source OS should be the industry standard for network hardware.
cesarb 4y ago
And make sure it has at least 16MB of flash and 128MB of RAM, if you really want it to have a long life. See https://openwrt.org/supported_devices/864_warning https://openwrt.org/supported_devices/864_warning for details.
andreareina 4y ago
They're becoming rarer and rarer. Bought a router three years ago, could only find one model sold locally that had openwrt support. Except for the latest revision, which of course is all that was available.
- thrtythreeforty 4y ago
  There's tons of perfectly functional corporate e-waste on eBay that supports openwrt, especially cloud-managed crap like Meraki that was junk when it was new. Nobody has any use for out-of-support routers, so really nice hardware (PoE, Wi-Fi 6, etc) can be had for $20 and an hour of pwning the stock image. I hate on Meraki so much because it's the epitome of something that doesn't need to be a paid subscription except for juicing customers (the hardware is great). Ubiquiti does cloud-managed the right way; you can self host and the hardware isn't bricked if you let maintenance lapse.

nerdponx 4y ago

I'm lately finding it hard to convince myself that there is a not a global conspiracy among large corporations to implement the "you will own nothing" directive by means of a ratcheting system. One big company rolls out an anti-consumer, anti-ownership, anti-freedom policy. People get annoyed and some small subset of customers leave, while the rest maybe grumble but stay. Then the next-biggest companies see that the big player is still doing fine with their anti-consumer policy, so they get a little greedy and start doing it too. Then all of a sudden it's a new industry standard, and consumers who value their own freedom find themselves rapidly running out of alternatives. Maybe if outcry gets really bad, the big corp need to roll back the decision, and either wait for a different opportunity, or let another corporation take the lead, or change the type of policy to be more subtle. My personal system for evaluating a conspiracy theory is: 1) how big is the payoff? 2) how hard is it to execute? 3) how hard is it to keep secret? 4) how many people need to be involved? This scenario passes all 4 criteria with flying colors. 1) The payoff is absolutely enormous. 2) It would be relatively easy for the same people who would be most strongly motivated to do this. 3) It should be easy set up a communication system that maintains almost total plausible deniability against collusion, because it actually only requires minimal knowledge of and cooperation between participants and their plans. Just a few meetings among subgroups of participants, and more head nods than spoken words. During the process, active communication can be reduced to basically zero. 4) Very few. Most corporate decision makers at most companies wouldn't have to know, they'll be able to see where things are headed and follow along. In general, the only holdouts will be HN poster types with small businesses that serve only tiny fractions of the market.

bombcar 4y ago
It’s even scarier - you don’t need any conspiracy or communication at all - companies trying to move to “aaS” models with subscriptions will naturally cause this with no collusion at all.
- MyBallsAreSexy 4y ago
  You can't even really own your computer anymore if you're a windows user. The entire operating system is "as a service" and windows 11 makes that even more true.

pessimizer 4y ago

They shouldn't be expected to update these for as long as they're useful. They should be required to open up the hardware if they refuse to update the software. That should be the rule: you get to pretend that locking people out of the hardware is for their own good as long as you continue to update their software for free. You can't just be allowed to arbitrarily EOL perfectly functional hardware.

ElCheapo 4y ago
In all fairness, as longs as patents exist you simply can't "open up" a piece of technology. What you can do is reverse engineer it, since it's allowed becausenof the manufacturer's drop of support
- causi 4y ago
  In all fairness, as longs as patents exist you simply can't "open up" a piece of technology That's not true at all. Divulging data without offering license terms does nothing to hurt your ability to enforce intellectual property rights. The people using that data just do so knowing they're technically breaking the law. Patents are not trademarks.
- wongarsu 4y ago
  Unlike trademarks, you can selectively enforce patents without risking them. And in a way, the patent system is exactly about "opening up" technology. After all the idea of a patent is "you tell everyone how to build it, in return nobody is allowed to use that knowledge commercially for X years unless you allow it. This aligns great with "give us the tools to modify the software of hardware you find commercially unattractive".
  - nrclark 4y ago
    I realize that is a bit of a topic change, but do you think that ideal reflects the reality of patents today? I've read a lot of modern patents, and not one of them was written to convey useful information. They're all dense legal writing, and as vague as the author can get away with. Most medium/big companies have patent attorneys whose entire job is writing patents. They don't care about the patents having any useful details to make it a useful reference. Usually the attorneys aren't subject experts on the patent topic, and couldn't make it accurate even if they tried. Modern patents are a game where you file a whole bunch and then wait for somebody to step on one by accident with a parallel invention. Then you sue them unless they have enough patents to also sue you. Patents don't promote innovation at all, at least not any more. If anything, they're a tax on our industry and they stifle small players - exactly the sort of person who they're supposed to help.

cesarb 4y ago

Networking hardware has a very long life. At a previous company, we used in the office as the center of the LAN a switch (Cisco Catalyst 3548 XL) which was already past EOL. In fact, it was so long past EOL that the switch model which replaced that model was also already past EOL. And yet, it worked perfectly (other than a couple of failed ports), and we probably used less than a tenth of its capabilities. I wouldn't be surprised if that same switch is still working today; the main reason to replace it would be that it only has Fast Ethernet (100baseTX), instead of the current mainstream default of Gigabit Ethernet (1000baseT).

Intermernet 4y ago

Many years ago I reported a bug with Cisco ios routers where the default admin login worked in the sdm web gui even after the account was deleted. I received no acknowledgement that the problem existed. After paying the support subscription, a year later the problem was silently resolved. I lost all trust in Cisco after that.

lizardactivist 4y ago

Some of these security issues really look like backdoors.. very odd

shrubble 4y ago

Cisco's Meraki line is explicitly designed to not pass traffic after the license/entitlement expires. That neans that an expensive 24 port managed switch for example, will brick itself after 7-10 years of life.