I just got my first switch, and I noticed it was manufactured on my first birthday.

u/lukmly013 πŸ’Ύ (lemmy.sdf.org)@lemmy.sdf.org to 196@lemmy.blahaj.zone – 140 points –

Cisco Catalyst 2960-24TT-L

49

You are viewing a single comment

2007, excellent year! Also, I swear Cisco those older switches are will run forever (as long as you don't reboot it too often πŸ˜‚)

(as long as you don’t reboot it too often πŸ˜‚)

Could you enlighten me on that? This sounds scary.

It's an old joke, when a switch (or any electronics really) has 365+ day uptime rebooting could kill the power supply during its POST power supply test.

Realistically you shouldn't have to worry about it, those are solid switches. I have a 3524 from 2001 that's still running, it gets bounced about once a year when I bump the power cable while recabling. I also have a 2960G that's on a UPS, and without logging in I couldn't tell you the uptime

don't update the firmware!!!!! these have a bug with their security module which essentially bricks them if you update past a certain point

Hmm. I planned to upgrade it to newest available IOS for this device, 15.0.2-SE11.
What kind of bricking are we talking about here? (Permanent or fixable)

I only found this:

A Catalyst 2960 with 64Mb of DRAM might display Low memory on the console after upgrading to 12.2(58)SE or later

Which should be fixed, and if not, I could just downgrade it back. Worst case scenario: I'll have to use xmodem instead of TFTP.

I can't remember the exact message, basically when we upgraded about 10 of ours, they wouldn't let us make any config changes past a certain point because they saw themselves as non genuine even though they are we've recently replaced all of our switching, I'll boot one of them up once I get in and check for you (+IOS version)

Do you remember if you could get to a rommon prompt? As long as console access is available you should've been able to upload replacement FW. I once had to use kermit or xmodem (I don't recall) @2400 bps to recover an AP by transferring new FW over the console cable (I'm not sure new APs even have a console port), but switches should be recoverable...the things you do, when you want to go home and not spend another day on site 🀣

My only caution would be to ensure that you use the correct FW. IIRC -L means Lan Base not IP Services, but it should warn you that there isn't enough space, if that's the case