Cisco 7200 Series Router

[@Nabeelco]

As a teenager, during an argument with my dad, to cut the tension, I cut him off and blurted out "Token Ring's dead, Dad. Get over it!". We both had a good laugh. 😂

[@TradieTrev]

ROFL!!

[@TheJonathanc82]

😂

[@clabretro]

😂

[@thomasbonse]

FDDI 🎤

[@theserialport]

Straight for the jugular! FDDI Forever

[@elremineh]

Looks like we are in for a treat, 46 mins of sweet old networking and routing!

[@ayitsyaboi]

Ever since discovering this channel my network has been overhauled twice. Built an opnsense router, swapped over to proxmox, have a symmetrical gigabit fiber install coming to replace the coax 1000/100 and I'm running new CAT6 drops to every room. Glad I finally got the motivation again because it's been so worth it. I appreciate the inspiration. Now I need to find a good deal on a rack and then afterwards forget my pin numbers to my cards.

[@clabretro]

haha that's awesome

[@Xploder270]

Opnsense is so much fun

[@julerobb1]

​@@clabretroI don't have open sense but I'm like you, I'm constantly tweaking my network and looking at my Ethernet drops that run along the floor into my closet like.. I need to run these under the house but I don't have a rack and dont want to go to the damp cobweb filled cramped crawl space

[@kaitlyn__L]

I only pay for the 150/150 package rather than the full 1000/1000 but full symmetrical internet has been wonderful. I would hate to go back

[@RCShufty]

If I ever get hit by a bus my wife would have no idea how to fix the internet connection in my house when it breaks.

[@tankgrrl]

"We're just messin' around in the basement" 😄

[@ryderrepairs]

you should try to find a cisco branded rack to hold all of your cisco related networking shenanigans

[@clabretro]

oh yeah that'd be sweet

[@robtongeman8480]

Dude DON'T EVER STOP making these !!! You're networking videos rock. Each one is bringing back so many memories from 20 years ago. Keep up the awesome work. 😊👍🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥

[@clabretro]

thank you!

[@InconsistentManner]

I was a student of computer science in 2009... there was several chapters in the networking class about token ring... Half as much as the number of chapters for ethernet networking. The 7 layers of the OSI model, There was a chapter dedicated to serial networking which as you are demonstrating is how these routers communicated with each other... I just found your channel recently, and I am touchingly blasted with nostalgia working as a Certified Networking Technician in the early 2010s.

[@swrzesinski]

Burned tantalum on Serial card is not a big deal. It Just got shorted and it blew. 2 redundant caps next to it Will do its job Just fine.

[@4rft5]

I love Cisco's constant use of just generic stock images of people on their products, makes you wonder what exactly they were going for with that

[@kbhasi]

Them doing that reminded me of 2000s Nokia phone packaging for unlocked variants (and variants where the phones weren't repackaged into service provider packaging)

[@clabretro]

yeah I hope you like me joking about it every time I see one, because I'm definitely not going to stop 😆

I wonder what the caption for those images was. "Business man stares into your soul" perhaps.

[@evanboonie]

I had a VXR with the NPE-G2 installed in it a while back. Interesting tidbit on the G2: it uses the fastest PowerPC 7448 CPU ever produced. The 7400 series of PowerPC CPUs is most widely known as the "G4" as used in Macintosh computers from the era.

[@clabretro]

I'd love to try out a G1 or G2 someday. Interesting about it being the fastest 7448!

[@pixitha]

The ebay prices for G2s are still quite high, wow! @@clabretro

[@evilZardoz]

I believe some have procured some NPE-G2s to gut them for their PPC chips to upgrade their vintage Macs!

[@thegeforce6625]

@@evilZardozyou’d be correct, DOSDUDE1 and HrutkayMods are the ones doing that.

[@herdware]

The 10mbit card has the AMD LANCE (Local Area Network Controller - Ethernet). Very common chip back in the day. Used by Sun, DEC, Commodore, Sony and others.

[@JF_ARVA]

That FLASH logo on the Cisco card is badass.

[@kbhasi]

It kinda reminds me of the Intel Flash logo. (Intel Flash chips were used to store the BIOS on some 90s PCs like mid 90s Toshiba laptops, if I recall correctly)

[@kaitlyn__L]

@@kbhasiI just assumed it was the same logo. But I tried to look up the logos just now to compare, and the results are all modern Intel logos and logos for The Flash, not Intel Flash logos 😔 even with boolean, even on DDG

[@kbhasi]

@@kaitlyn__L Yeah, I think it's obscure. I remember taking apart a Toshiba 440CDT and 480CDT to repair both and saw those Intel Flash chips, which I later assumed held the BIOS.

[@kaitlyn__L]

@@kbhasi I feel like I’d have to go seeking out a history page or a video of someone taking apart an early MP3 plate for total confirmation lol. But I know the one you mean and definitely went “oh it’s that original logo” when I saw it. I don’t think anyone else would make it back then bc Intel invented it, and was licensing it to others which included the logo. So, yeah. That’s a big part of why we still say flash rather than generically “NAND storage” tbh. Intel was doing everything to push that name and logo back then. It’s basically a generic trademark now (not sure if legally), which I know companies aren’t fond of, but in my mind that’s the ultimate mark of success for a trademark.

[@kbhasi]

@@kaitlyn__L I did take a photo many years ago of the chips but lost it as I only posted it to a private Facebook group. I may still have the photo buried deep in my NAS, though.

[@jdbarney]

Ah - the dreaded points calculation on the 7200. I had forgotten about that, but I certainly remember doing it back in the day.

[@treyscarborough1901]

Yeah we used to use them to terminate adsl subscribers and we would max them out by putting 2 ds3s cards on one side and one oc3 in the other. With that configuration we would then run into both the maximum number of subinterfaces and the maximum number of interfaces you could configure on a system. We could only save the config to flash and it had to be at night when there wasn't much traffic on them.

[@jfbeam]

I didn't forget. That backplane is PCI and has a very finite bandwidth. The VXR is faster, but it still has bus bandwidth limits.

[@livewire98801]

When you add gig-e fiber cards and realize you just turned your 7206 VXR into a 7202 VXR...

[@jfbeam]

@@livewire98801 That's what the NPE-G1 and NSE-100 are for. 'tho by the gig-e era, they had better hardware. (7401 for starters)

[@theserialport]

24 channels for 1.5Mbps awesomeness! great work - now we're Token Ring Dreaming 🤓

[@IBM_Museum]

We ran three of them at the ISP I worked for about twenty years ago - I wish I could have held on to at least one of them when decommissioned a dozen years ago.

[@slazer2au]

Up until 2020 I was working for an ISP in Australia where we used 7206 with G2 cards as our core and edge routers.

[@videosuperhighway7655]

Still have 2 running in my shop.

[@EtherealDragon]

Yikes, you guys must have had some kind of special support contract from Cisco on those, or just not cared. The EOL docs on those show last maintenance release in 2015 with last support date of late 2017. The enterprise I support right now has some old iron at various locations, and even with multiple tens of thousands of devices on support contracts they hold firm to those EOL dates.

[@gorak9000]

What kind of outdated ISP was using this stuff as their "backbone" in 2020? Jeez, the ISP I use uses multiple 100gbps rings on DWDM as their backbone!

[@mrfrenzy.]

​@gorak9000 some places in the world still has lots of adsl with very long cables that are not economical to replace.

[@gorak9000]

@@mrfrenzy. Fiber cable is much cheaper than copper, because there's no copper in them and copper is quite expensive these days. If it made economic sense to run copper to somewhere in the first place, it makes sense to replace it with fiber now and yank out the old copper and sell it. North America is really starting to see some major investment in FTTP finally - only like 15 to 20 years behind more progressive places that rolled out fiber decades ago. Even Australia will go FTTP eventually - even if somehow you're further behind than north america is

[@Space_Reptile]

oh boy more obsolete enterprise level networking gear that im facinated by yet will never touch or interact w/ in real life this is an unhealty interest that i assume many IT folk share and im glad its free to experience on youtube

[@francistheodorecatte]

hahahah, when I saw the stuck card I _knew_ it was going to be jammed in there upside down. the networking lab I worked in when I was in high school had several 7200 series routers, and the flash cards getting jammed in upside down was a common occurrence.

[@clabretro]

haha

[@hcblue]

Aw man, token ring! I was in college in 2009 and my dorm still had those connectors you showed in the jpeg (token ring to Ethernet). People would call the connectors baluns ("balanced-to-unbalanced"). I never knew the real name, but from the URL are apparently "hermaphroditic connector".

[@kbhasi]

Your comment reminded me of an article I read many years ago where the author mentioned that the secondary school, high school, or college (I can't remember which) they attended used Token Ring networking at the time (which I think was the early '90s).

[@dono42]

We must be close in age. When I was in grade school I remember friends talking about T1 as being the fastest thing to envy. Though I wasn't interested in networking until about a decade into my career. That 2821 is quite nostalgic. I previously had a used 2811 that I used when studying for the CCNA. Unfortunately I never had much direct experience with token ring, so I'd love to see it up and running.

[@chaseohara4781]

CSU/DSU Serial clock signal is definitely a beginners trap. ❤😂

[@dataterminal]

I was working at a college around '97 time, and we had fast ethernet for the workstations, most of the servers and several stacked SCSI towers for AXIS token ring CDROM servers.

[@uiopuiop3472]

that high teck even now

[@TheJonathanc82]

One of the companies I worked for was completely wired for token ring. It was interesting to see it all still in place well after it was no longer relevant.

[@gold_7944]

Love this video Learning CCNA on 2960 Switches and 1941 Routers It's pretty cool to see this stuff fro real instead of just in a packet tracer Lab

[@JayJay-88]

Oh dear, this brings me back. Great to see a retro networking video. 😁 We used the 7200s as PE routers for our MPLS customers. Also early on it was used as BRAS and the ADSL DSLAMs would connect over ATM OC-3. The E1/T1 cards were fractional so they could carry many customer connections. For example one customer would have a 64 kbps leased line and use one time slot, another customer had 256 kbps and used 4 time slots. All terminating on the same card. Later there was even a fractional OC-3 card which could do sub rate down to single DS0s (I remember it was a very expensive card!). There were also pure POSIP cards - Packet Over SONET/SDH which we used back when SONET/SDH was still a thing. Over all it's was a very versatile platform. The same cards were also usable on the 7500 IIRC. Hope you'll get your hands on the legendary GSR as well. 😉

[@GeoffSeeley]

Yes, wipe your configs if selling network gear! I'm talking to you Facebook who's config I found on a used Arista switch I bought.

[@chaseohara4781]

T1 had an almost mythical status far beyond when it was truly the King of the Hill. Even in the days of Cable and VDSL, I remember lusting over a T1 with others. I think it was a combination of the guaranteed speed (cable being multi access and DSL depending highly on distance to the CO and how oversubscribed the phone company wanted to be) and the rock steady latency that made it so desirable compared to more consumer focused options. But beyond that, I think it just became almost a legendary nerd achievement to have access to a T1. It was a very weird time. Haha 😂

[@kanalnamn]

There were a well spread misunderstanding amoung youngsters that T1 meant 10Mbit/s and T3 meant 100Mbit/s. (T1: 1.544Mbit/s, T3: 44.736Mbit/s, E1: 2.048Mbit/s, E3: 34.368Mbit/s. I'm not very samiliar with the SONET/T-carrier system, but in the european system one E3 or 21 E1 can be muxed into a VC3. A VC4 can carry three VC3. An STM-x (x= 1, 4, 16 or 64) can carry x VC4.)

[@hayzeproductions7093]

38:30 yeah, I forget to slap the dam boot on too when putting connector ends on and crimping them. I think this is a normal issue for IT industry all together. Your not the only one 😂😂😂

[@clabretro]

every time

[@DarrenMossAU]

Great old router and definitely legendary status in the industry. They were rock solid and many of them only stopped working once they were retired. Good video!

[@LB4FH]

Oldschool Cisco stuff on a Sunday morning has started to become a new favorite 😁 Never seen these old 7200's before

[@H3adcrash]

I wonder.. That token ring card causing boot loops seems an awful lot like a power rail pulling too much current. I wouldn't suspect the seemingly bodged on regulators, but those yellow tantalum capacitors like to fail with a dead short across them, as you can see also happened on that serial card where one even exploded. You could try to just desolder one of those yellow caps one by one and see if it comes back to life, and then put in replacements. Could be an easy fix!

[@clabretro]

oh good call, that could be it!

[@H3adcrash]

@@clabretro It could be worth a shot to fix it at least!

[@jaydubzonward]

retired a pair of these in 2020... really didn't think they'd been around since 1996, i remember them going in new!

[@chadhartsees]

Had a CISCO CCNA class in high school (circa 2000). Had to configure using the command line and configure network connections on the hardware (IE - making a T1 line) - which was next generation compared to this. I've forgotten all of it. It's amazing that you can learn things and forget them.

[@flp322]

Use it or lose it. To keep with the computing theme, your brain is like a cache - only keeps the things you access. The upshot - if you decide to learn something again after forgetting it, it’s easier the second time.

[@gorak9000]

Heh, I also took a CCNA class in high school in probably 2000 - I remember thinking back then already that it was laughable connecting routers over back to back serial cables, with those big chonker v.35 connectors in the middle. Even the school had a cable modem at that point. I also remember the 'teacher' knew absolutely jack squat about the course, and was essentially just there as a babysitter while we went through the course material, the practical stuff, and did the online quizzes ourselves.

[@JMassengill]

That 7206 was just slightly before my time. I worked with the 2600/2800 but you never work with production routers much as messing inside those in production will get one fired. Great video thank you for the effort

[@AaronPace93]

Very cool! This router is before my time when I started my networking career. Funny enough though, for the last year been trying to move a T1 off one of these in our data center…

[@jeffbrl]

This video brought back memories. I joined SprintLink (one of the Tier 1 ISPs at the time) in 1998. Token ring was on its way out but we still had to keep it alive for some low speed edge routers. Most of the routers were 7500 and GSR. I think it wasn't until a few years later that we adopted 7200s for BGP route reflectors. Good times.

[@TonyCR1975]

Dude your videos are really exciting to watch, hope you make more about older hardware

[@clabretro]

thanks!

[@-szega]

So the backplane of these looks like it's just PCI (considering the AMD PC-net NICs with no bus adapter on the board and that the NPE has Intel DC1111C PCI/PCI bridges towards the backplane connectors), but what I find really curious are the two Intel TL82543GC on the I/O controller at 8:50. Those are 1000BASE-TX / GigE NICs. Huh? 17:46 might just be a footprint snafu, the PCB designer intended for the LDOs to be upright but maybe that doesn't quite fit in the max z-height of the tray or they'd get bent and short with components easily. Easy fix => just tell the factory to slap a ton of kapton tape on the components below and bend the LDOs over. No PCB revision needed!

[@-szega]

It seems i82543 were used for some Fast Ethernet cards as well on the 7200 VXR. Meanwhile the GigE cards seems to have used Broadcom NICs. Kinda weird, isn't it? This would've been the time where a GigE NIC cost a big premium over a 10/100 NIC.

[@mansnilsson4382]

This message was transmitted by a 7206VXR that runs my home network. I've got the NPE-G1and actually only run the GE ports on it. Nit-pick: The configuration is in NVRAM, not on the PC cards; they're only for operating system image storage. I've been meaning to replace the 7206 with a 892 for ages, but the VXR is so conveniently reliable!

[@clabretro]

very cool! those G1 and G2s look impressive.

[@nickwallette6201]

Yep - channelized T1 cards only work in IOS 12.4. :-) I was wondering for a moment if you got bit by the same problem I did a few years back. There's another kind of T1 WIC that fits into the 2800 slots, but is made for some other oddball router ... a Metro E box or something like that. Physically compatible, not supported though. I bought half a dozen of them. sigh....

[@clabretro]

haha weird that they were physically compatible

[@RachaelSA]

I spent the late 90s and early 2000's building ISP's with these kinds of things. I still have loads of old 2600s and 2800's and piles of 1600's.

[@clabretro]

nice! cool machines.

[@ScottEvans-vk7hse]

That Kline Ethernet tool is awesome, best purchase I've ever made! (OK slight exaggeration!) but I'm a fan of the pass through connectors too...

[@clabretro]

makes it so easy

[@xrtnn]

7200 series also have dual slot pa adapters like PA-A2-4T1C-OC3SM and similar

[@clabretro]

oh yeah those would be cool to mess around with

[@flp322]

Just binged all three of the Cisco episodes (I don’t watch your videos in order, just when I feel like it). Super interesting stuff. Looking forward to the next installment!

[@StanleySeow]

I was configuring these puppies in year 1999 ... brings back lots of memories... IOS commands...

[@kanalnamn]

If you had two 120 Ohm to 75 Ohm baluns available you could have gone from TP-E1 to coax E1. Tx and Rx are more visible that way. Then you only need a large nation wide network of Sonet-muxes. :) (For real, you should get a couple of small muxes and run a OC3/STM1 between them via fibre, and mux your T1 in on one of the VC11-slots on that.)

[@olearycrew]

"That's probably more than you ever wanted to know about that" -> could really be the tagline for the whole channel TBH and I'm here for it.

[@clabretro]

😂

[@RNMSC]

Installed, and/or monitored several of these through the years. It is one of the few routers that honestly it would be safe to call a boat anchor if it catastrophically failed. Mostly because of the copper winding's in the power supply. Both of the companies I worked for at the time (late 90's, early 2k's) were very extensive users of Token Ring. They were also both heavy mainframe users (though I don't know if the one was using IBM mainframes, or someone else's.) I suspect that if you ask around the biggest and most persistent users of Token Ring were in businesses where "No one ever got fired for buying IBM' and were in sectors considered highly conservative, (Financial services, Insurance, etc.) Have fun, and keep checking on the hardware. And remember that there has been a large sector of the community that has been hording releases of IOS, simply because it made more sense to do that than to not have a version of code to fall back on if someone dropped support for a piece of hardware the business relied upon.

[@studioxxswe]

"obviously never had a T1 as your house" ....... LOL Yea I had a E1 in my apartment back around 2000. Technically Europe had the fastest internet as we had E1 and E3 instead of T1 and T3 connections so I had 2 Mbit/s leased line in my apartment curtesy of BT (where I worked at that time) Has an Cisco 1600 as my router and of course a TSU/DSU (have different names here as well) running over one analog circuit. Had a /28 public IPv4 range as my disposal... I ran my own DNS as well with full PTR delegation.. ohh good times.. My serial was connected to one ... Cisco 7206 VXR .... Configuring time slots in Frame Really is .. difficult.

[@JayJay-88]

Let's guess that the DNS PTR was used for funny hostnames on IRC. 😅

[@clabretro]

very nice. in the states we pretty much made the switch from dial-up to broadband in most areas in the early 2000s

[@studioxxswe]

@@JayJay-88 now you hurt my feelings, I would never do that.. ohh was that what my friends wanted to do when they asked me if they could "lease" on of my IPs.. i even placed one of my printers on a public IP just for fun, in case someone wanted to send me cool stuff..

[@studioxxswe]

@@clabretro yea right.. I used to work for British Telecom, was always fun to talk to my US colleagues about "broadband" :D

[@ryanfoley8035]

I think the MII port was for an AUI type transceiver. I own a Sun ultra enterprise 1 with 2 fast ethernet sbus cards with MII ports.

[@clabretro]

I saw that actually, it'd be cool to get an old Sun on that one day.

[@evilZardoz]

You can actually run the NPE-225 in the 7200 non-VXR (I have one in one of mine). Advantage is being able to support 256MB RAM vs 128, so you can run newer software. My boxes have the PA-2FE-TX cards, an E1 card and a bunch of PA-A3-OC3MM cards; they were originally used for routing between ATM LAN emulation eLANs at a large university; one was the Internet border gateway. I ran one of these as my Internet border at home, but the NAT translations would cause my memory to exhaust itself on later releases of IOS (many which worked on 128, but claimed to require 256MB). Shortly after upgrading to the NPE-225 from the NPE-200, I moved to a 2851. There were two types of memory card supported - ATA flash (as you pictured), and linear flash.

[@sfoyogi8979]

you need a newer IOS version to support some cards and have the OS recognize them... T1 PRI cards were T1 cards that also did "Dial" in 64 kbps ISDN chunks.... this model later came in the "VXR" model which supported different NPE's / modules, etc. these racks were really good at agggregatiating disparate WAN (including T1 thru external/csu/dsu (via a v.35 cable) before gig Ethernet took over.

[@nervenderkobold2861]

On the 2800 the IOS may to be too old. I have also a 2800 in my homelab. I my firmware is c2800nm-adventerprisek9-mz.151-4.M12a.bin With my VWIC3-1MFT-T1/E1 i have to say in the config: card type e1 0 0 in your case should be card type t1 3 0

[@netzwerk-werkstatt332]

I am working with Cisco devices since the year 2000. Every router model you have shown here look very familiar to me 😀. Looking forward to see other legacy network techniques in future videos.

[@hongkonghacker]

It is good and very stable, my boss change to use Vyotty software router, there have a bug make the BGP up and down, he insist to keep using it for a week, after change back to use Cisco 7206, everything is working fine.

[@julerobb1]

If you get a chance, I'd love to see you what you can build a handful of ISR4321'S and a few c2960 TT switches. I used those on my CCNA courses and fell in love with them. Enough to where I bought a used 2960 on eBay. Sadly I'm stuck on iOS 12 as it doesn't like the iOS 16 universal image.

[@JoBo-ug6tf]

I don't remember what the modem speed was at the time, 14.4, 28.8 or 56k, but I drooled every time I read about T1 and it's stupid fast speeds! Those massive pin connectors kinda remind me of the 2009/10 Mac Pro CPU connector. Just missing the massive locator pins!

[@wcavendish]

That was a fun watch. I got my start in the ISP space and we used these 7206 routers with channelized DS3 cards hooked up to adtran muxes. This allowed us to run a whole mess of T1's out of each 7206. Later we had the fancy NPE's that had fiber interfaces on the NPE to not use up bandwidth points for the other PA cards. I may even have some configs from those days. I had lots of fun with T1 multilinks back then.

[@thomasbonse]

If you get the 8-port IMA cards and a few Adtran TA-600 series devices (TA-612, for example) you can load an ATM firmware image to then run in ATM mode instead of TDM mode. Just pay attention to the hardware revision, since the v3 versions use a different image than the v1/v2 versions.

[@myinterests5573]

The first real "IT" job I had was working at a company as a tech support person, we had a token ring network, with a Banyan Vines backbone - connecting all the different rings. We used either IBM PC's or Compac Lugable's as work stations.

[@jblyon2]

I was given a 7206 with a couple 8 port 10Base-T cards, a 4 port T1 card, and 2 others that I believe had various serial ports on them. I messed with it for a while and then ended up selling it on eBay in 2007 I believe. Someone bought it for an ISP in Central America. I hope it brought internet to some people who would have otherwise been unable to get it.

[@ryanreedgibson]

I had dozens of these from upgrading the BIE to the 8500 series. They are all built like a tank.

[@romchiko]

Thanks! I still using VXR 7206 with NPE-G2 module for BGP in 2024 😂😂😂 it’s still working like a Swiss clock

[@Doomzdayisgone1969]

I got to travel all over the country setting up a network I designed. MCI and Norlite frame relay over native T1 and some ISDN PRI with BRI backup links.

[@Ttarler]

As a teen I always wanted a T1 line…. Now I have a 2 gb Fiber so I think I’m set. 🤣 but definitely following this channel for networking, the cable making segment alone was incredibly useful.

[@Todd1561]

I used to work with these a lot when I worked in Cisco’s labs many years ago. Immediately felt old when I saw this was a ‘retro’ channel lol

[@doalwa]

I could barely finish the video, this is some SERIOUS hardware pr0n right there....damn! 🤤

[@toronaldaris]

I've got the more modern variant like you have, but I have an NPE 400 in mine.

[@clabretro]

nice! I want to hunt down one of the g1 or g2s someday

[@udirt]

LOL... the token ring bit... Should I go to the basement and see if there's still the 2504 around? It even had beta IPv6 firmware ;-)

[@hottractor1999]

Those were awesome pieces of equipment. I've seen them with Ethernet, tokening, serial interfaces, t-1 cards. Ran IP, and IPX/SPX

[@joer8035]

I worked in the Cisco support lab in 2012 and these were some of the worst to deal with, squeezing in the back and pulling out the NPE almost always resulted in scraping your hand. Still a good amount of customers around the world were using these in production at the time.

[@johnadriani7467]

Awesome, you're messing around and you're entering really complicated commands... but I wouldn't have thought that you'd make the mistake with the cable... that's why the green lights mean that at least the physical connection is displayed... every beginner learns that ... well that's usually the case when you operate such highly complex things

[@wesley00042]

After bonded T1s, you should look into fractional T1s. A lot of small businesses in the late 90s had a T1 with 12 channels for Internet and 12 voice channels going to their PBX.

[@colinstu]

6:44 is that window going to be covered up? That appears to be large enough to be the secondary egress, which is necessary to have a room rated for bedroom usage. But I guess it's easily reversible if/when moving out. 7:59 does eject button not fully depress for that PCMCIA slot? Normally you click it in & then it pops out, and then you click it in again and it ejects the card. Love seeing all this stuff done w/old cisco gear! 22:30 ah, card was jammed in upside down ugh 44:20 maybe time for a cable tester too

[@clabretro]

yeah the window is framed in properly now, it's just a technique where you build the entire wall at once first and then cut out to exactly what the window needs.

[@colinstu]

@@clabretro makes sense

[@JBothell_KF0IVQ]

thats so awesome. PIX routers were literally the thing that saved the internet. Id be curious if you have come across any Super Micro systems of this vintage. Their semi-more recent stuff is extremely fun. I have one running my homelab rn

[@ponaboy]

next up...deep dive on ATM and LANE. i reckon you could snatch some sweet FORE or Marconi kit on the cheap, too.

[@drofwarcnwahs2108]

This was the last router I worked on as a network engineer. Went into management after that. Don't remember much about it. I spent most of my time with IGS, MGS and AGS+ routers.

[@buckstarchaser2376]

The card with the broken capacitor should work just fine. It was paralleled up with a few others as a sort of reservoir for a switch mode power supply (rather than for a frequency-tuned circuit). The result of losing one of the 'buckets of energy' in this type of power supply is that it will switch faster for a given power demand, possibly suffering ripple or undervoltage events at 100% load. Usually (especially when/where this card was designed/made), an electronics engineer will significantly de-rate the labeled values of capacitors in this type of application, because bulk storage capacitors often have tolerances of 10-20%, meaning losing that one may simply bring the performance of that circuit block down to the actual circuit requirements at full load. The Token Ring card causing system upset is completely normal however. Token Ring is generally bad luck, and raises gremlin population of all nearby technology. When your ring starts beaconing, that's the gremlins laughing at you. Any form of movement, sound, or ill thoughts will disturb and anger the gremlins, and your basement may cease to be the fun playground you originally planned on. I recommend you eject the TR card into space at your earliest convenience and stay up-range in case the gremlins foul up the rocket. The card with the actual, observable, physical damage - on the otherhand - is probably going to be your most trustworthy and loyal component in the entire system.

[@clabretro]

some other folks mentioned that about the capacitor, I'll have to give that board a try after all. and yes, setting up token ring will be fun 😂

[@buckstarchaser2376]

@@clabretro Just keep an active volcano nearby so you don't have to venture far when it becomes obvious that the ring belongs in the lava.

[@Kardall]

oh man. Token ring networking would be awesome to mess around with. I remember hearing about it, and not understanding anything about it. That would be sweet.

[@fjs1111]

I'm still running a Cisco 3640 router on one of our networks that still used bonded DS1s they are quite robust!

[@TomStorey96]

You can set the config register to ignore the system config, and then once it boots up, use the "show startup-config" (or "show start") command to see what it was. "Show running-config" or "show run" and "show config" will show you what the current operational config is, which will be blank if you tell it to ignore the config on startup.

[@TomStorey96]

Of course once you do a "write mem" (also "copy run start") you'll overwrite the old startup config and lose it

[@clabretro]

Ah that makes sense. Would you have expected a "show start" required after telling it to stop ignoring and a full reset like that though?

[@TomStorey96]

@@clabretro hmm, not sure if I understand, but "show start" always shows the startup config whether it was ignored or not. "show run" always shows what the device is currently running, which would be the same as "show start" if not ignoring, or a default config at boot if it is ignoring.

[@clabretro]

Yeah it was just odd that the startup config (I thought) wasn't being ignored anymore at kzbin.info/www/bejne/hmbHpKRna5KXlassi=Tc47dzg0Po3O238Y&t=1676, yet was still blank. And previously I saw errors relating to what definitely looked like an existing config. At any rate, I'll be checking "show start" from now on!

[@TomStorey96]

@@clabretro oh yeah it definitely still had a config stored in it. That seems all too common with routers and switches I've bought over the years. As you guessed, all of those errors that streamed up the screen were for hardware and maybe software features that didn't exist (e.g. different software version/feature set, or modules that have been moved around). When I say ignore I only mean that it won't load the startup config into running config at boot. But the config still exists wherever it is stored so you can then view it afterwards. On most older Cisco devices its stored in an EEPROM rather than on the flash card, but modern routers store it in flash (IIRC the 2800 works this way). Maybe I need to re-watch the exact sequence of what you did, but generally: 1. Break in to ROMMON during boot, set config register to 0x2142 to ignore the stored startup config 2. Boot the router 3. Router comes up with a "blank" config (hence you get the prompt to configure the router), as in, nothing is configured but it'll have some basic contents 4. You can do a "show start" at this point to view the stored configuration, "show run" will just show the blank config from above 5. Configure the router as you wish, "write mem", and set the config register back to 0x2102 to boot up with your new configuration. Next time, "show start" and "show run" will both show your config.

[@somename8831]

Worked for a company that had the token ring wiring but used herma rj45 adapters to run modern network. Was like playing with lego plugin those in.

[@lezlienewlands1337]

The only reason I knew T1 was a connection standard was Unreal Tournament 99 had it as a connection speed. This stuff's fascinating!

[@pjaz6800]

Im also reppin the Connections Museum merch, was in Seattle last week and went for the first time and was in awe the whole time.

[@clabretro]

awesome!

[@vahurstar]

How many customers bought these port adaptors without considering the bandwith point requirements and got dissapointed when they couldn't use them as they maxxed out their system. Good old days

[@MrDukeLeto]

The last two ISPs I used to work still use C7206VXR with NPE-G2 very widely in 2024.

[@ExtremeMetal]

I really need to overhaul my network. I'm switching away from my ISP shitty router and picking up a WAN router with openWRT firmware to allow me to forward any port I like, it might also give me the push to learn and implement VLANs, probably should not have all my management ports open to the same network as all my client devices...

[@clabretro]

yeah VLANs can be fun to setup!

[@samsthomas]

Oof. Not even a VXR. These things were real workhorses, and I’ve seen them in operation as recently as 4 years ago.

[@AlpineTheHusky]

I was DAMN shocked when I saw "Made in Austria" on the power supply. Id guess those aint gonna fail any time soon

[@hartze11]

Fun video.... since you have a spool of cable there, it would be neat to see how far you can shoot that T1 line... if you can get to the far end of that spool, put a connector on it and see if you can shoot the 1000 ft or so that's in there. T1 should shoot well past that, but I'm curious if two routers can shoot that distance.

[@michaellegg9381]

The v35 card will still work. The blown cap is likely a filter cap and it will run without it!! It might make it unstable on long leads but short leads after the breakout adaptor will probably work or at worst you loose 1 of the 8 channels.. thats why it shows it booted up and green light. If the card was not functional at all the card will prevent power up and not have a green ready light. So replace the cap because it's needed for stability or for 1 channel to function properly but the rest of card is working well enough to boot.

[@clabretro]

some other folks mentioned that too! I'll have to give it a try

[@michaellegg9381]

@@clabretro yeah systems like this are all about redundancy and super stable connections so it's probably functional and tested fine because it works in the basic system tests. Like motherboards with dud caps are still still functional but slowly becoming unstable over time as more filter caps fail. Same as tiny caps on CPUs or phone motherboards you knock 1 off and the Device still seems to work with our it lol I used to think why have these parts if they are not needed but as I found out it's usually just for stability of signals or to make sure it can deliver consistent voltage with out getting to low making the CPUs unstable.. so it needs the cap to be perfectly stable but it is likely still working.

[@loiphin]

The same box I used to pass my CCIE lab about 22 years ago ... geez times flies

[@cylecrum9782]

OMG its so cool to see one of these, I use these inside of GNS3 for my virtual topologies. Really cool to see it in a video!

[@clabretro]

ha nice!

[@idahobackpacker]

You're really bringing back some memories! When I was in the carrier space, we had both 7200s and VXRs. fed by DS3s. Swapped them out with 7600s.

[@Koutsie]

aw yes, time to absolutely munch this video 🎉

[@Max_Marz]

No idea why I watched this but OHMYGOD they make pass through rj45 plugs?!?!?!

[@clabretro]

it's so much easier if you're just doing a few wires around your house.

[@memadmax69]

I bet someone was running a small dial-up ISP with that router.

[@cclark3452]

Cut my teeth on a token ring network. Not that hard to get set up. Just make sure the ring speed is set not on auto. great fun!

[@1993MAZDAMIATA]

Dude finally! I have been waiting since you showed this a couple weeks ago.

[@SwitchingPower]

The little bit of memory @7:52 is not DRAM like you usually see on those modules but in this case its FLASH storage named bootflash: Also note the big Dallas chip below it, It is an SRAM chip with build in battery and when that battery dies all the data is lost, so before that happens get a cheap EEPROM programmer and dump the memory and put it back in a new SRAM module you get from a place like Mouser and not some vendor from china because they sell old modules with already almost dead batteries.

[@clabretro]

yeaaaah wasn't excited to see that Dallas chip