So, networking mishaps....

Just a post to get some funny stories of networking

I'll even post this first one.

I had just started working at this place (a very well known research university!), been there a few months.

We had a pair of Cisco 7609's as our border routers. The plan was to upgrade them in a month or so, but we had to get larger compact flash cards (from 128 to 256 Mb) cards. We bought some at lunch from Fry's (as the Cisco branded ones in 2005 were EXPENSIVE), and when we got back from lunch, I talked with my two fellow network folks, confirmed with both of them that just ejecting and inserting the new CF cards would have zero impact on the routers. Stopped by and told my boss (the assistant director of networking) what I was going to do. Calmly went into the data center, walked up to both border routers, ejected the existing CF cards, inserted the new ones, and went back to my desk to format them, get the new code on them, and get them ready for the upgrade in a few weeks.

Sat down, and started getting the pages from our monitoring system that everything was down. And I mean, EVERYTHING.

Well, apparently, there was a "feature" that if the router detected non-Cisco compact flash, it "could" reboot. Unfortunately, I did the OIR on BOTH border routers, because, what could go wrong?

Immediately got up, went to the data center, followed by my coworkers, the assistant director, and the director of networking. I explained what was going on, what happened, and why it happened as I was replacing the blank/new compact flash with the original, as it had the IOS and a backup of the configurations (just in case).

TL;DR - Put brand new, non-Cisco compact flash into BOTH Cisco border routers, causing them to reboot. At 2:00 PM, on a school/work day. At a research university.