The thing that I love about these videos is that if someone demonstrated this equipment to me like this when it came out, I would think it was the coolest thing ever. 25 years later, I work in the industry, and I'm still just as fascinated by it.
this has quickly become one of my favorite creators and i really do not know why, i think its the genuine excitement in his demeanor when he talks about things he finds interesting and the fact that i also find them interesting
Hi, i just want to say that your videos kinda influenced my job ideas and now i started an apprenticeship at the local city administrations IT department and what i learned today is that there was some cisco stuff (2600 series, 1700 series and 800 series) to be shreddered soon, i give 3 guesses whats now in my stack™ xDD. so thank you for all the work you do to entertain (and educate in a lot of cases) us we all love you for that :D
There is a box full of old WICs sitting in our test lab at work. If you are looking for something specific let me know. Ton of sealed T1 cards in there. I also have some Checkpoints if you are looking for some late 2000s firewall tech. Cool to see a 2600 (way before my time). All of our internal routing at work is done with Layer 3 switches now, and the only dedicated routers we have are Cisco ASRs for edge routing. Plus, firewalls route pretty well too nowadays (I honestly prefer routing on Palo Alto more than cisco these days) Always enjoy the videos, keep it up boss
hey! I'd definitely be interested. if you're up for it you can reach out to the email in the channel's about page (might need to be on a desktop to see it).
I am a young network engineer working with Cisco stuff and the issue with the hub forgetting the mac of the XP Machine actually reminded me a lot of an issue I saw within the last year or so where some machines that don't send packets very often would drop off the MAC tables of switches exceptionally quickly so one of my scripts to check the mac tables to figure out which port a computer was plugged into would only work if the computer had been communicating in the same few moments around when I checked. Interesting to see a similar phenomena from hardware released 4 years before I was born!
I'd love to see you rack ALL of your equipment. Like every piece hooked up in a rack in one GIANT, glorious configuration. Probably not feasible, but I think it'd look cool.
Back in College (about 6 years ago now) they let us screw around with a bunch of old Cisco gear. Seeing those commands typed in brings back so many memories. Manually setting IPs and configuring switches... Those were the days.
The Laser sticker on the FastHub has Swedish written on it: "Apparaten skall anslutas till ett jordat nätuttag". Wonder if it lived some of it's days in Sweden?
I also have a "hub story." When I was young, before I knew the difference between a hub and a switch, a friend of mine sold me a Dell 24port hub out of the back of his car for $50. That thing powered so many LAN parties.
If you want switches to match your 515s and 2600 - you want the 1900 series. 10M ports with 100M uplinks. The FastHub type front bezel is in line with the 2900 2U series of switches like the WS-C2924M-XL.
I more recently found this channel, but I was recommended this video and it feels like this is the origin story of a super-techspert lol, you had never used iOS before this video and now you know it really well. It really gives me hope that I’ll be able to learn how to do this stuff if I get a job working on a large-ish network, so thank you. You have been doing great for over a year now, and I’m sure you don’t plan on stopping that any time soon! Keep up the amazing work!
FYI - With the cisco equipment you can download the firmware from one device and push it back to another one with the copy command and tftp. No need to go hunting for another copy :)
Not sure you can do that with the Pix. (at least prior to v7 where flash actually has a filesystem.) These days, to get anything for older gear (2500, 2600, etc.) you'll have to beg the internet as Cisco has deleted them from history. (I have a selection from my era of running them.)
@@jfbeam I seem to recall doing it with both of my old pix515s. I still have one around somewhere. Maybe after I'm done setting up my new (to me) asa5525x failover pair I should try to find it to check again. But yes, I also remember torenting 1gb+ zip files full of outdated cisco images still hidden behind a tac paywall. I probably still have one or two of those around somewhere too.
@@serpent77Just confirmed with the old 506 running 6.3, there's no interface for copying _out_ of flash. v7+ puts an actual filesystem in flash that does support general access. (confirmed from the 515 with 8.0) IOS, of course, has always supported both - even a tftp-server to feed files directly.
A couple of tips having worked on Cisco: -Doing just "wr" will save the config. -A lot of commands can be shortened, configure terminal for example can be config t -When you're within config t, you can execute commands like wr using "do" so you don't need to back out to the prompt. This is handy for "do sh run" from my experience iOS can take some learning, but it is fairly simple once you get the hang of it. Think in my 15+ yrs of working on Cisco, I've only seen commands for making VLANS change.
Loving this content! Also interesting that it might have been from PHH Mortgage in Syracuse, NY. Must have been a branch router with two T1's from Verizon. What a time to be alive.
Pro Tip with Super Glue: Less is more, get it on the face of the two surfaces that are mating, and press the two surfaces together as hard as you can for at least 30 seconds, minimum. The reason less is more is because less cures faster. The reason you want it on the face of the mating surfaces and pressed together hard for 30 seconds is because that gives it the greatest contact area for it to bond to, with the thinnest application for when it cures and crystalizes. Applying crazy glue to the outside of the break does nothing but make it harder for the glue inside the mating surfaces to out-gas, cure and crystalize. The reason super glue is strong is BECAUSE of how quickly it cures. Using more than the least possible amount, ruins the strength of the glue.
I owned an ISP back in late 90s early 2000s and had many 2600 routers. You probably know this but figured I'd mention couple things. 1. you can make a cross over cable for the T1 lines if you want to experiment in your lab between two 2600. 2. configure terminal can be shorten with config t and copy run start can be used to copy your running config to startup config. WOW, brings back memories, I spent so many hours inside that IOS interface back then. Many of my customers were T1 customers. You can also do T1 bonding with 2, or 4 T1 DSU cards. 2xT1s would get your 3Mb/s and if I recall, if one of the T1s goes down, you can fall back to 1.4Mb/s.... Enjoy the trip through memory lane.
BTW: the "no service password-encryption" line in the original config means that password encryption of otherwise plaintext passwords was disabled and could be veiwed in plaintext by looking at the config. This would not apply to passwords set using the "secret" command as those are always encrypted. Also, instead of typing out "copy running-config startup-config" you can just type "wr" instead (wr is short for write).
Easily has become one of my favorite channels on UA-cam. This Cisco stuff is so cool. Please get the T1 stuff going! T1 was before my time so I’d love to learn more about it
thanks! I'll definitely mess around with the T1 stuff since I've got two capable routers now. if you haven't seen The Serial Port's ISP videos about T1 they're great!
Great perseverance, so nice to see this working in full effect! at 30:48 this reminded me of the main annoyance of working with ASA failover pairs- the hostnames! It would have been so useful to have been able to set globally unique device hostnames so you could know which unit you were logged in to. Pretty tight failover, you lost 5 pings, I hope this meets your basement enterprise SLA :)
I had a course on cisco on high school (2016) and yet I didn't know how cool can network gear be. This is amazing, I love watching this during cooking (yeah sometimes something burns because I am just looking at my screen amazed by video). Thanks.
I was a network engineer in that period and installed many Cisco hardware for a communications company. This video gave me good vibes of that period and I really enjoyed that job. You did a fantastic job, well done ! Looking forward to that 7200, I still have one installed in my rack.
I've got a 2611XM serving as a dial in gateway for my legacy lab. You can fill that larger WIC slot with an NM-8AM card and get 8 33.6k modems to mess with. I've got that piped into an Adit channel bank connected to an adtran that feeds it a T1 RBS signal for 24 single phone lines. That comes back to Asterisk and from Asterisk out to my SIP provider. Probably should start calling it my home telco instead of home lab lol.
Been in the industry since these were new, still amazing demonstrations of the kind of solutions IT has always been striving for - high availability equipment that stays out of sight, out of mind.
Thanks for showing these! Old networking hardware is alwys cool to see. Switching from admin to devops I also really miss fiddling with real hardware, but don't really have the space at home for a homelab. These videos are absolute zen.
On modern ASAs, the failover and heartbeat are over regular Ethernet, and many have SFP sockets for these interfaces allowing you to place your secondary unit in another building. And the failover is nearly invisible when initiated manually, which gives you completely hitless software updates. Recently took out a pair of 5585-X units, which has build quality far exceeding the vintage PIX units demonstrated in this video.
Dude I love your channel, the presentation is so good that I always tune in even if I think the subject won't be interesting for me, but you always make it interesting. Thank you for sharing!
Not sure how this showed up in my recommended videos, but it was interesting nonetheless. Back in the 2000's I setup a few HA pairs of this exact model and yeah, it was pretty amazing. Love to see these old things really get a wider audience. It's not like the 515s were super rare back then but it's just something not a lot of people were aware of unless you were a net/system admin, so it's nice to see them get some proper love.
MPC860- the first PowerQUICC SoC released as far as I know. They still make space-grade single-board computers with PowerQUICC SoCs. The CPU on the management module in that FastHub is actually a 486.
When you changed the confreg, it wiped the config as you found. In rommon you can "rename" the flash:/startup_config to flash:/clabretro and reboot the system. Once it boots, you can copy the file to the running_config, delete the other file, while you have privilleged access: you can show the previous configuration. All without changing the confreg. I think the config registers are so resellers can wipe the config fairly simply. Youre welcome.
I worked for 9 years at a University starting in 1998. Cisco was considered luxury. We had each closet connected with fiber and ATM links. That would break out with stacks and stacks of Cabletron hubs, one of the worst network vendors. The single thing that pushed the buracacy of education to change to a switched topology was not speed, management, or scalability. No it was security. People, using telnet, mind you, were getting their passwords stolen. In 2002 once we decided to upgrade we tried to get Cisco ethernet switches, but they were too costly. I dont remember the brand that won out, but i think the name started with the letter V or N. They were nice with vlaning and vlan gateways, trunking, etc. Edit: pretty sure they were Nortel switches.
I can smell some of the things from that HUB having ended up in CatOS, I used to have a big 12 blade Catalyst 5500 that I managed, that was originally from 98 i think, and it was a BEAST. It survived lightning strikes and the only reason we ended up replacing it was due to needing VOIP (QOS tagging), POE and more gigabit ports. It really did make me sad because it was such a great device to work with as we had one of the newer supervisor modules. Never managed to get it above 20% load even when dropping a Ghost image via broadcast to around 100 computers.
MG chemicals... I respect you for using the good stuff!! I do use 99% alcohol but for the final touches always use specialized stuff like MG... Also contact cleaner and low pressure air on motherboards/sockets/cpu/ram. And always avoid repairing PSUs units except replacing fans.
Back in 2006-2008 and in 2009-2011 I took the CCNA classes in trade school, and we used Cisco 2600 routers and Cisco 2950 in the lab. The first years we also had 2500 routers. Nostaligia...
I've got quite a bit of used racknount modulators from all 30 of our tv vans from the 80s and 90s before we figured it was cheaper to go up and down linked best part about them is the have out and return 4 inch monitors built into 3 rack space units. We used em for coax drops all over Boston. You want em just reimburse me for the shipping after u receive them. They all work with manuals and VHS operation videos. Plus I got a ton of leader vector/waveforms and coax/fiber converters that used to cost 10g a price but nowadays they are 199 bucks new lol let me know be happy to donate to someone who'll use em. I can use the storage space in the studio. Just don't remember where they came from if u broadcast off them lol
Ues to have to maintain a pix firewall 515E was used exclusively at the business. I worked at between 2010 and 2015. They were really reliable. Never really had an issue with it. Was very easy to maintain and configure back when I was working with Cisco products
The many-port FastEthernet card you mentioned for the 2600 series router would problably only funtion at a layer 2 level, meaning essentially a built in switch. This means that you could not just use one of those ports as a regular layer 3 router port. If the description for the card mentions anything about having "switched ethernet ports" that is what this is refering to.
the windows technical books being used as a monitor stand in the background in one of your final shots is priceless with some mild DeJa'Vu I might add because at the office I'm on a SFF with display #1 on top of the chassis and display #2, you guessed it...the books :P - thank you so much for this content.
if I remember correctly, it's CTRL Shift 6 X to enter ROMMON mode. I had a 2621 router and PIC 515E back in early 2000s at my house with a T1 line provided by my employer with an IPSec tunnel back to the corporate headquarters so I could monitor and work from home. Good old days waaaaay before Covid.
Man. T1.... Reminds me of the serial port YT channel lol. Also the newer Cisco 1941 routers (which I own) still take WIC, in terms of EHWIC cards as well.
I can't speak for that cisco hub, but back in the early 2000's my home network was running off an hp managed hub (that I got for free). While they couldn't do all the fun stuff of managed switches like 802.1q vlans, they had a feature quite similar. You could partition the hub. So you could have ports 1, 2, 5 & 6 in one segment (broadcast domain), then 3 and 4 in a separate segment. Absolutely blew my mind at the time
Good old 515E! I have a bunch of 501, 506E and a couple of ASA5505 laying around. Have been replacing the 5505 with Fortigate lately. I have bunch of old hardware like yours lying around...
Its a Celeron 300A, Mendocino core. Back in the day I had a Slot 1 version running at 504 Mhz with a gigantic AlphaCool heatsink with 2 Delta 60mm screamers on it. As for the Cisco gear, I do not enjoy IOS, but I can function in it if needed.
I would have thought stateful would mean TCP or UDP if it understands the high level protocol, like FTP or SIP. There is no firewall state needed for ICMP.. Try establishing an ssh session then see if it survives a fail over.
I'm currently in school for it support and I love gear like this. We train on 2900 switches and 4300 routers. Writing configuration scripts for IOS and firing them away and have it just work is so fun and rewarding. A shame that management stuff is moving to the cloud if you ask me
I am curious about why the hub needs to learn connected MAC addresses. I wonder if this is just so the network manager can find what port a device on the network is plugged into.
if you wanted to look at the config before you wiped the device, you could have done a copy start run because you're still in exec it would keep you in priv mode and you can reset the password at that point. dont forget to change the register though.
I had to learn these along with Cisco CAT OS. I kept my running configs on floppies 👴The old stuff did have amazing quality. Too bad Cisco's licenses weren't built to last :p
Thanks for sharing a very interesting video. Also props on audio quality, sounds great and I don't hear any mouth noises and clicks (many channels have horrible audio)
Modern gear you can use console cable or even mini usb cable. I have mine setup using a serial telenet server. If you are talking about meraki type of Cisco gear those require a subscription and can be accessed over the internet by IT. I actually have my home network running off of cisco networking gear using two 3560X 48port POE+ Switches and a Cisco 3825 Router. My firewall however is not Cisco it is a Netgate hardware running PfSense+ and using a Lantronix EDS4100 4-Port COM Server powered over POE to be able to login and configure the equipment over the network.
Also if you get a Netgate hardware with PfSense+ you can use the same Cisco Console cable to configure the Netgate Firewall hardware along with using a usb cable. You can also configure the netgate PfSense+ firewall over the network but can be kind of tricky as you would need to find out what the IP address it is using along with using the first port marked as LAN and if you are wanting it do any logging then you need one that has dedicated NVME storage which is typically the MAX version. The one I have is Netgate 6100 MAX which is one you can either have sitting on a desk, wall mounted, or even rack mounted.
I'm not surprised that the processor was reported as a Pentium II. Back when Celerons and Pentium IIIs were first released in the Socket 360 form factor, many early BIOS would report Celerons as Pentium IIs. Took manufacturers a year or two to get the processor identification correct.
Just an idea for that 7200 Router - Try importing a full BGP table into it. (There a number of step by step guides.) Have done this in a Gns3 lab, would be cool seeing it being done on a 7200
That 7200 would explode with a full table from today, I’m afraid! The current Internet tables contain over a million prefixes - challenging for a router designed when there were about 10% as many prefixes.
That's a 7200 (not 7200VXR) so it'll have an older NPE that cannot physically hold enough memory for a modern full table. (they could barely hold a full table circa 2003.)
I love these old Cisco videos, such a throwback. Do you have a switch with VLAN support? In that case you could probably set the 2600 up with two virtual interfaces on the same ethernet port and work it as a very hacky router 😉
Love this! (Also, now that I can vicariously live the retro cisco world through you... if you need any other gear ideas...) 2948G-GE-TX I *think* is Cisco's first dedicated gigabit switch? I think may've been gigabit modules for their modular switches before perhaps. It's also 1.5U .. so kinda weird/neat. There's also the WS-C3550-12T / WS-C3550-12G... also fairly old gigabit switches but came after the one above. the 12T being 12x RJ45s and 12G being 10x GBIC (which you could then plug in gig modules) + 2x RJ45s. Always kinda wanted to poke around with them but knew I'd get very little use and there's so much to do already.
@@clabretro Are you going to eventually dig into CallManager & get a 7960G phone? And/or dig into an Aironet 1100... whip out an old Thinkpad and connect to that. Could really have a sweet 2002 setup.
im embarking on a similar journey with Cisco ASR1002 Routers, Cisco ASA5520 Firewalls and some cisco switches, hopefully im able to put together a functional network. Dont know how far ill get
Of all the things to suddenly key in on and notice, that XP machine came out of a car dealership at one point based on having both an ADP install agent as well as CDK Driver icon on the desktop...
Looks like the WICs are all "real" WAN interface cards like T1/E1, serial modem or DSL, so not really much to expect for conventional ethernet. The expansion module you've mentioned (NM-16ESW) may come with a gigabit daughterboard. Pretty interested about whether that GE port can be setup as a dedicated routed port
You can always try the old "no switchport" config. I don't think the ESW can do that. (the WIC-4ESW won't, but the WIC interface is only 8Mbps. The NM slot is a PCI interface.)
@@jfbeam Actually after digging through documentation, I do think the ESW will expose all ports to the router, so no switchport will work and so does the gigabit port
You can make 2600 more fun with additional VPN card for internal expansion port - for this you will need more ram too - i think 128mb ... I'm playing with same shit now :D
maybe someone said it, but you could have looked at the old config on the 2600 by doing a "file" and there would be a config file most likely. but if they used the default config, you doing the write memory would have over written it.
The thing that I love about these videos is that if someone demonstrated this equipment to me like this when it came out, I would think it was the coolest thing ever. 25 years later, I work in the industry, and I'm still just as fascinated by it.
haha I know what you mean
Back when there was no GUI and people really had to think with their heads!
this has quickly become one of my favorite creators and i really do not know why, i think its the genuine excitement in his demeanor when he talks about things he finds interesting and the fact that i also find them interesting
same here! i stop what im doing whenever clab uploads, the only youtuber i do that for. Something about enterprise hardware is just fascinating to me.
Hi, i just want to say that your videos kinda influenced my job ideas and now i started an apprenticeship at the local city administrations IT department and what i learned today is that there was some cisco stuff (2600 series, 1700 series and 800 series) to be shreddered soon, i give 3 guesses whats now in my stack™ xDD. so thank you for all the work you do to entertain (and educate in a lot of cases) us we all love you for that :D
I'm glad to hear that! and nice additions to your collection!
There is a box full of old WICs sitting in our test lab at work. If you are looking for something specific let me know. Ton of sealed T1 cards in there. I also have some Checkpoints if you are looking for some late 2000s firewall tech.
Cool to see a 2600 (way before my time). All of our internal routing at work is done with Layer 3 switches now, and the only dedicated routers we have are Cisco ASRs for edge routing. Plus, firewalls route pretty well too nowadays (I honestly prefer routing on Palo Alto more than cisco these days)
Always enjoy the videos, keep it up boss
hey! I'd definitely be interested. if you're up for it you can reach out to the email in the channel's about page (might need to be on a desktop to see it).
"This is obviously a bettuh setup - there's mo stuff hooked up!" ... This is a man after my own heart, I swear.
I am a young network engineer working with Cisco stuff and the issue with the hub forgetting the mac of the XP Machine actually reminded me a lot of an issue I saw within the last year or so where some machines that don't send packets very often would drop off the MAC tables of switches exceptionally quickly so one of my scripts to check the mac tables to figure out which port a computer was plugged into would only work if the computer had been communicating in the same few moments around when I checked.
Interesting to see a similar phenomena from hardware released 4 years before I was born!
Awesome! Yeah I wonder if it dropped the table when I plugged in the module or something. Network was still totally operational.
I'd love to see you rack ALL of your equipment. Like every piece hooked up in a rack in one GIANT, glorious configuration. Probably not feasible, but I think it'd look cool.
someday! all the retro gear in one rack is definitely the eventual plan
It would be doable take awhile and probaly pretty pretty slow if you get the hubs involved but yeah it would be cool to see
Back in College (about 6 years ago now) they let us screw around with a bunch of old Cisco gear. Seeing those commands typed in brings back so many memories. Manually setting IPs and configuring switches... Those were the days.
There is one company that has a rack in a datacenter where I have some of my equipment that still uses the 515e in a production environnement...
doesn't surprise me!
The Laser sticker on the FastHub has Swedish written on it: "Apparaten skall anslutas till ett jordat nätuttag". Wonder if it lived some of it's days in Sweden?
it must have been sold in Sweden, that's the regulation here (and most of Europe) around grounded power (specially for rack mounted equipment)
Really enjoying these on the Saturday morning. Best way to start the weekend!!
I also have a "hub story." When I was young, before I knew the difference between a hub and a switch, a friend of mine sold me a Dell 24port hub out of the back of his car for $50. That thing powered so many LAN parties.
haha that's awesome
I did my CCNA with a 2600 a long time ago now, this brings back memories!
nice!
I love that equipment I installed and supported 25+ years ago is now so "vintage" to warrant UA-cam content. I'm officially old.
someday people will be making videos about "what windows 11 was like" ha
Amen to that!
Yep - I maintained a bunch of PIX515 clusters in the day, and moved on to Cisco ASA. So happy to not have dealt with Cisco Firepower!
You should try to acquire a Cisco Local Director. It's basically a PIX but instead of a firewall, the Local Director is a load balancing appliance.
If you want switches to match your 515s and 2600 - you want the 1900 series. 10M ports with 100M uplinks. The FastHub type front bezel is in line with the 2900 2U series of switches like the WS-C2924M-XL.
I think a 1900 series switch is in my future
I more recently found this channel, but I was recommended this video and it feels like this is the origin story of a super-techspert lol, you had never used iOS before this video and now you know it really well. It really gives me hope that I’ll be able to learn how to do this stuff if I get a job working on a large-ish network, so thank you. You have been doing great for over a year now, and I’m sure you don’t plan on stopping that any time soon! Keep up the amazing work!
thank you! always something more to learn haha
FYI - With the cisco equipment you can download the firmware from one device and push it back to another one with the copy command and tftp. No need to go hunting for another copy :)
it's funny, I was wondering about that while I was flashing it. I'll have to try that out
Not sure you can do that with the Pix. (at least prior to v7 where flash actually has a filesystem.) These days, to get anything for older gear (2500, 2600, etc.) you'll have to beg the internet as Cisco has deleted them from history. (I have a selection from my era of running them.)
@@jfbeam I seem to recall doing it with both of my old pix515s. I still have one around somewhere. Maybe after I'm done setting up my new (to me) asa5525x failover pair I should try to find it to check again.
But yes, I also remember torenting 1gb+ zip files full of outdated cisco images still hidden behind a tac paywall. I probably still have one or two of those around somewhere too.
@@serpent77Just confirmed with the old 506 running 6.3, there's no interface for copying _out_ of flash. v7+ puts an actual filesystem in flash that does support general access. (confirmed from the 515 with 8.0) IOS, of course, has always supported both - even a tftp-server to feed files directly.
@@jfbeam It would appear I stand corrected, thx for confirming.
A couple of tips having worked on Cisco:
-Doing just "wr" will save the config.
-A lot of commands can be shortened, configure terminal for example can be config t
-When you're within config t, you can execute commands like wr using "do" so you don't need to back out to the prompt. This is handy for "do sh run" from my experience
iOS can take some learning, but it is fairly simple once you get the hang of it. Think in my 15+ yrs of working on Cisco, I've only seen commands for making VLANS change.
nice, I didn't know about "do"
Loving this content! Also interesting that it might have been from PHH Mortgage in Syracuse, NY. Must have been a branch router with two T1's from Verizon. What a time to be alive.
Thanks! I bet you're right based on that host name it briefly flashed on the screen
Pro Tip with Super Glue: Less is more, get it on the face of the two surfaces that are mating, and press the two surfaces together as hard as you can for at least 30 seconds, minimum.
The reason less is more is because less cures faster. The reason you want it on the face of the mating surfaces and pressed together hard for 30 seconds is because that gives it the greatest contact area for it to bond to, with the thinnest application for when it cures and crystalizes.
Applying crazy glue to the outside of the break does nothing but make it harder for the glue inside the mating surfaces to out-gas, cure and crystalize. The reason super glue is strong is BECAUSE of how quickly it cures. Using more than the least possible amount, ruins the strength of the glue.
I owned an ISP back in late 90s early 2000s and had many 2600 routers. You probably know this but figured I'd mention couple things. 1. you can make a cross over cable for the T1 lines if you want to experiment in your lab between two 2600. 2. configure terminal can be shorten with config t and copy run start can be used to copy your running config to startup config. WOW, brings back memories, I spent so many hours inside that IOS interface back then. Many of my customers were T1 customers. You can also do T1 bonding with 2, or 4 T1 DSU cards. 2xT1s would get your 3Mb/s and if I recall, if one of the T1s goes down, you can fall back to 1.4Mb/s.... Enjoy the trip through memory lane.
Awesome! I'm definitely gonna have to dive into the T1 world... and I didn't even think about bonding, that'll be really cool to try out!
BTW: the "no service password-encryption" line in the original config means that password encryption of otherwise plaintext passwords was disabled and could be veiwed in plaintext by looking at the config. This would not apply to passwords set using the "secret" command as those are always encrypted. Also, instead of typing out "copy running-config startup-config" you can just type "wr" instead (wr is short for write).
ah thanks!
Wr doesn't always work. Sometimes you have to configure an alias for it. I think that's usually for Nexus gear though.
Easily has become one of my favorite channels on UA-cam. This Cisco stuff is so cool. Please get the T1 stuff going! T1 was before my time so I’d love to learn more about it
thanks! I'll definitely mess around with the T1 stuff since I've got two capable routers now. if you haven't seen The Serial Port's ISP videos about T1 they're great!
Great perseverance, so nice to see this working in full effect!
at 30:48 this reminded me of the main annoyance of working with ASA failover pairs- the hostnames! It would have been so useful to have been able to set globally unique device hostnames so you could know which unit you were logged in to. Pretty tight failover, you lost 5 pings, I hope this meets your basement enterprise SLA :)
my SLO error budget is in shambles. yeah that host name really tripped me up for a moment haha
small tip for repairing plastics (if you want them realy strong that is) use superglue with baking soda for a stone like bond
I've heard about that, I'll have to try it
I had a course on cisco on high school (2016) and yet I didn't know how cool can network gear be. This is amazing, I love watching this during cooking (yeah sometimes something burns because I am just looking at my screen amazed by video). Thanks.
Man I love these videos as a Cisco networking guy the older Cisco routing/switches/hub/firewall are very similar to the newer technology.
I was a network engineer in that period and installed many Cisco hardware for a communications company. This video gave me good vibes of that period and I really enjoyed that job. You did a fantastic job, well done ! Looking forward to that 7200, I still have one installed in my rack.
thank you! awesome to hear you've got a racked 7200
In the late 90's I made a hub by cutting the cat5's and splicing them all together. It actually worked lol.
ha!
I've got a 2611XM serving as a dial in gateway for my legacy lab. You can fill that larger WIC slot with an NM-8AM card and get 8 33.6k modems to mess with. I've got that piped into an Adit channel bank connected to an adtran that feeds it a T1 RBS signal for 24 single phone lines. That comes back to Asterisk and from Asterisk out to my SIP provider. Probably should start calling it my home telco instead of home lab lol.
sounds awesome haha. yeah now that I have this stuff I think it'll be a rabbit hole
This sounds like such a fun lab setup.
You are one of my favourite creators right now. I've always loved networking, but this older stuff is so cool!
thank you!
Not gonna lie, my guy-videos like this are why I’m into networking. :)
Been in the industry since these were new, still amazing demonstrations of the kind of solutions IT has always been striving for - high availability equipment that stays out of sight, out of mind.
Thanks for showing these! Old networking hardware is alwys cool to see. Switching from admin to devops I also really miss fiddling with real hardware, but don't really have the space at home for a homelab. These videos are absolute zen.
thanks for watching!
On modern ASAs, the failover and heartbeat are over regular Ethernet, and many have SFP sockets for these interfaces allowing you to place your secondary unit in another building. And the failover is nearly invisible when initiated manually, which gives you completely hitless software updates. Recently took out a pair of 5585-X units, which has build quality far exceeding the vintage PIX units demonstrated in this video.
I've heard good things about ASA.
I was waiting for PIX for so long. Im hyped!
I love the continuity of your videos
Love how you mentioned lan parties, some of these switches were our bread and butter back in the day. Great explanation as always mate!
Dude I love your channel, the presentation is so good that I always tune in even if I think the subject won't be interesting for me, but you always make it interesting. Thank you for sharing!
thank you!
Not sure how this showed up in my recommended videos, but it was interesting nonetheless. Back in the 2000's I setup a few HA pairs of this exact model and yeah, it was pretty amazing. Love to see these old things really get a wider audience. It's not like the 515s were super rare back then but it's just something not a lot of people were aware of unless you were a net/system admin, so it's nice to see them get some proper love.
Nice! They've been fun to learn and mess around with, still impressive to see them work so well all these years later.
WIC and HWIC are two different types of cards. so for the 2610 you would need just a plain WIC card.
That's so wild, those T1 cards probably came out of the office building next to mine
Love these retro networking gear videos! There's something oddly fascinating about these old networking systems. Keep up the great content!
thanks!
MPC860- the first PowerQUICC SoC released as far as I know. They still make space-grade single-board computers with PowerQUICC SoCs.
The CPU on the management module in that FastHub is actually a 486.
When you changed the confreg, it wiped the config as you found.
In rommon you can "rename" the flash:/startup_config to flash:/clabretro and reboot the system. Once it boots, you can copy the file to the running_config, delete the other file, while you have privilleged access: you can show the previous configuration.
All without changing the confreg. I think the config registers are so resellers can wipe the config fairly simply.
Youre welcome.
ah-ha, makes sense
A well, for catalyst; ASR and some other platforms are different (like their weird old 802.11 wireless bridges, etc)
You seem like a man I could be a best friend with.
Next time you're passing through Edmonton, beers on me :)
Ha, thank you!
"This thing is 26 years old, makes you wonder if your the first one in here" Lol
I worked for 9 years at a University starting in 1998. Cisco was considered luxury. We had each closet connected with fiber and ATM links. That would break out with stacks and stacks of Cabletron hubs, one of the worst network vendors.
The single thing that pushed the buracacy of education to change to a switched topology was not speed, management, or scalability. No it was security. People, using telnet, mind you, were getting their passwords stolen.
In 2002 once we decided to upgrade we tried to get Cisco ethernet switches, but they were too costly. I dont remember the brand that won out, but i think the name started with the letter V or N. They were nice with vlaning and vlan gateways, trunking, etc.
Edit: pretty sure they were Nortel switches.
ha awesome. was thinking about trying out some ATM links
I can smell some of the things from that HUB having ended up in CatOS, I used to have a big 12 blade Catalyst 5500 that I managed, that was originally from 98 i think, and it was a BEAST.
It survived lightning strikes and the only reason we ended up replacing it was due to needing VOIP (QOS tagging), POE and more gigabit ports. It really did make me sad because it was such a great device to work with as we had one of the newer supervisor modules. Never managed to get it above 20% load even when dropping a Ghost image via broadcast to around 100 computers.
those blade units look like absolute monsters
MG chemicals... I respect you for using the good stuff!! I do use 99% alcohol but for the final touches always use specialized stuff like MG... Also contact cleaner and low pressure air on motherboards/sockets/cpu/ram. And always avoid repairing PSUs units except replacing fans.
PHH is also out of NJ in the US, really enjoy your videos. I was just starting my career in that era, and it's fun to see this stuff again.
Thanks for watching!
Cool! Did you try the the RPS just to see if it really works?
I used so many of those 2600’s for leased lines and wans back in the day.
Can’t wait to follow this series! Keep it up!
thanks!
Back in 2006-2008 and in 2009-2011 I took the CCNA classes in trade school, and we used Cisco 2600 routers and Cisco 2950 in the lab.
The first years we also had 2500 routers.
Nostaligia...
I've got quite a bit of used racknount modulators from all 30 of our tv vans from the 80s and 90s before we figured it was cheaper to go up and down linked best part about them is the have out and return 4 inch monitors built into 3 rack space units. We used em for coax drops all over Boston. You want em just reimburse me for the shipping after u receive them. They all work with manuals and VHS operation videos. Plus I got a ton of leader vector/waveforms and coax/fiber converters that used to cost 10g a price but nowadays they are 199 bucks new lol let me know be happy to donate to someone who'll use em. I can use the storage space in the studio. Just don't remember where they came from if u broadcast off them lol
Ues to have to maintain a pix firewall 515E was used exclusively at the business. I worked at between 2010 and 2015. They were really reliable. Never really had an issue with it. Was very easy to maintain and configure back when I was working with Cisco products
Hub? Hub! Er, um, I’m so confused. In 2010 I was throwing all hubs off the network. Hubs are a nightmare on larger networks. Great video.
May I suggest LibreNMS as a great open source SNMP platform. It can be picky to setup but is rock solid once you get it configured
I was thinking about messing around with LibreNMS, thanks!
If you want help to set that up, I would be happy to offer my help.
thanks! I'll let you know if I get stuck
The many-port FastEthernet card you mentioned for the 2600 series router would problably only funtion at a layer 2 level, meaning essentially a built in switch. This means that you could not just use one of those ports as a regular layer 3 router port. If the description for the card mentions anything about having "switched ethernet ports" that is what this is refering to.
that's a good point, I'll check that. was also thinking about hunting down an ethernet WIC (assuming those exist)
I don't even think that the switch card is supported in the 2600 line, I think you need a 3620 for that. Also note that this only takes 10Mbit WICs.
the windows technical books being used as a monitor stand in the background in one of your final shots is priceless with some mild DeJa'Vu I might add because at the office I'm on a SFF with display #1 on top of the chassis and display #2, you guessed it...the books :P - thank you so much for this content.
haha awesome
if I remember correctly, it's CTRL Shift 6 X to enter ROMMON mode. I had a 2621 router and PIC 515E back in early 2000s at my house with a T1 line provided by my employer with an IPSec tunnel back to the corporate headquarters so I could monitor and work from home. Good old days waaaaay before Covid.
The different case designs could also be a vestige of the equipment being made by different vendors that Cisco acquired.
Man, I couldn't wait for the next installment of the PIX! And it is awesome.
Man, ethernet hubs.... The pre-switch haha...
Man. T1.... Reminds me of the serial port YT channel lol. Also the newer Cisco 1941 routers (which I own) still take WIC, in terms of EHWIC cards as well.
Newer Cisco stuff. They are still super high quality. Hefty. And still modular! I upgraded my Cisco 1941 with DDR2 ram, to 4Gigs and still boots.
I love all the modularity
@@clabretrodude! I'm actually trying to get my CCNA in a couple of weeks. So hahaha... Willing to help if you wanna configure these lol.
I can't speak for that cisco hub, but back in the early 2000's my home network was running off an hp managed hub (that I got for free). While they couldn't do all the fun stuff of managed switches like 802.1q vlans, they had a feature quite similar. You could partition the hub. So you could have ports 1, 2, 5 & 6 in one segment (broadcast domain), then 3 and 4 in a separate segment. Absolutely blew my mind at the time
For an idea, combine your Sunray setup with the piix setup, the sunrays can wan boot right? You could show failover streaming a full desktop!
ohhh now that would be interesting!
@@clabretroThat would be cool, do it!
Good old 515E! I have a bunch of 501, 506E and a couple of ASA5505 laying around. Have been replacing the 5505 with Fortigate lately. I have bunch of old hardware like yours lying around...
Nice, was hoping to see this working! Keep up the awesome content!
thanks!
In my high school CIS class we used the 2600 series for labs, it was fun
Nice Nostalgia! (Our HS had ... not even dialup for students in the early 90s)
Its a Celeron 300A, Mendocino core. Back in the day I had a Slot 1 version running at 504 Mhz with a gigantic AlphaCool heatsink with 2 Delta 60mm screamers on it. As for the Cisco gear, I do not enjoy IOS, but I can function in it if needed.
I would have thought stateful would mean TCP or UDP if it understands the high level protocol, like FTP or SIP.
There is no firewall state needed for ICMP..
Try establishing an ssh session then see if it survives a fail over.
yeah ssh would be a cool test once I configure the stateful failover
I'm currently in school for it support and I love gear like this. We train on 2900 switches and 4300 routers. Writing configuration scripts for IOS and firing them away and have it just work is so fun and rewarding. A shame that management stuff is moving to the cloud if you ask me
I am curious about why the hub needs to learn connected MAC addresses. I wonder if this is just so the network manager can find what port a device on the network is plugged into.
yeah I was curious about that too. I wonder if this hub has some more advanced behavior or something
And you're right, that Celeron is a Pentium II, but without cache. Some later Pentium 2 chips did come on that socket, example the MMX chips.
God, what beautiful equipment.
if you wanted to look at the config before you wiped the device, you could have done a copy start run because you're still in exec it would keep you in priv mode and you can reset the password at that point. dont forget to change the register though.
yeah I did it wrong haha. same outcome though
At 15:48, that bottom text is in (quite bad translated) Swedish. Strange.
maybe some sort of import or sale regulations?
I had to learn these along with Cisco CAT OS. I kept my running configs on floppies 👴The old stuff did have amazing quality. Too bad Cisco's licenses weren't built to last :p
Excited for the PIX stuff
Thanks for sharing a very interesting video. Also props on audio quality, sounds great and I don't hear any mouth noises and clicks (many channels have horrible audio)
Thanks! I'm always trying to improve it, it's been a journey.
Modern gear you can use console cable or even mini usb cable. I have mine setup using a serial telenet server. If you are talking about meraki type of Cisco gear those require a subscription and can be accessed over the internet by IT. I actually have my home network running off of cisco networking gear using two 3560X 48port POE+ Switches and a Cisco 3825 Router. My firewall however is not Cisco it is a Netgate hardware running PfSense+ and using a Lantronix EDS4100 4-Port COM Server powered over POE to be able to login and configure the equipment over the network.
Also if you get a Netgate hardware with PfSense+ you can use the same Cisco Console cable to configure the Netgate Firewall hardware along with using a usb cable. You can also configure the netgate PfSense+ firewall over the network but can be kind of tricky as you would need to find out what the IP address it is using along with using the first port marked as LAN and if you are wanting it do any logging then you need one that has dedicated NVME storage which is typically the MAX version. The one I have is Netgate 6100 MAX which is one you can either have sitting on a desk, wall mounted, or even rack mounted.
Wooohhoooo!! One again a great video! 🎉🎉
I'm not surprised that the processor was reported as a Pentium II. Back when Celerons and Pentium IIIs were first released in the Socket 360 form factor, many early BIOS would report Celerons as Pentium IIs. Took manufacturers a year or two to get the processor identification correct.
wish I knew what Nic or however you spell it meant and it was great to learn how this old stuff works with today's internet
network interface card, I should have mentioned the full name!
@@clabretro thanks
Just an idea for that 7200 Router - Try importing a full BGP table into it. (There a number of step by step guides.) Have done this in a Gns3 lab, would be cool seeing it being done on a 7200
That 7200 would explode with a full table from today, I’m afraid! The current Internet tables contain over a million prefixes - challenging for a router designed when there were about 10% as many prefixes.
That's a 7200 (not 7200VXR) so it'll have an older NPE that cannot physically hold enough memory for a modern full table. (they could barely hold a full table circa 2003.)
Lot of interesting vintage stuff, I wonder if you could grab one of the very early Mikrotik routers to tinker with, thanks for content, nonetheless
I have done this rommon password reset so very many times ❤😂
Playing CS 1.5 and Tribes back in the day and everyone was raving about T1 and T3 etc hahaha :P
exactly ha
loving the content
thanks!
I love these old Cisco videos, such a throwback.
Do you have a switch with VLAN support? In that case you could probably set the 2600 up with two virtual interfaces on the same ethernet port and work it as a very hacky router 😉
I do, good idea haha
That may have happened on a production system or two back in the day@@clabretro, although I take no blame for that 😉
I love this series. I have some old IT gear I need to spin up and make some videos on 😂
Love this! (Also, now that I can vicariously live the retro cisco world through you... if you need any other gear ideas...) 2948G-GE-TX I *think* is Cisco's first dedicated gigabit switch? I think may've been gigabit modules for their modular switches before perhaps. It's also 1.5U .. so kinda weird/neat.
There's also the WS-C3550-12T / WS-C3550-12G... also fairly old gigabit switches but came after the one above. the 12T being 12x RJ45s and 12G being 10x GBIC (which you could then plug in gig modules) + 2x RJ45s. Always kinda wanted to poke around with them but knew I'd get very little use and there's so much to do already.
I was thinking about hunting down some early gigabit switches!
@@clabretro Are you going to eventually dig into CallManager & get a 7960G phone? And/or dig into an Aironet 1100... whip out an old Thinkpad and connect to that. Could really have a sweet 2002 setup.
im embarking on a similar journey with Cisco ASR1002 Routers, Cisco ASA5520 Firewalls and some cisco switches, hopefully im able to put together a functional network. Dont know how far ill get
nice!
Of all the things to suddenly key in on and notice, that XP machine came out of a car dealership at one point based on having both an ADP install agent as well as CDK Driver icon on the desktop...
haha good eye. close: ua-cam.com/video/8nRFjwM5vwU/v-deo.html
Looks like the WICs are all "real" WAN interface cards like T1/E1, serial modem or DSL, so not really much to expect for conventional ethernet. The expansion module you've mentioned (NM-16ESW) may come with a gigabit daughterboard. Pretty interested about whether that GE port can be setup as a dedicated routed port
yeah hoping that can be a routed port!
You can always try the old "no switchport" config. I don't think the ESW can do that. (the WIC-4ESW won't, but the WIC interface is only 8Mbps. The NM slot is a PCI interface.)
@@jfbeam Actually after digging through documentation, I do think the ESW will expose all ports to the router, so no switchport will work and so does the gigabit port
i would love to see some T1 content
yeah once I learn how to use it I'll make some videos 😂
You can make 2600 more fun with additional VPN card for internal expansion port - for this you will need more ram too - i think 128mb ... I'm playing with same shit now :D
cool!
That's funny I was just thinking of setting up a redundant virtual router for my main router.
maybe someone said it, but you could have looked at the old config on the 2600 by doing a "file" and there would be a config file most likely. but if they used the default config, you doing the write memory would have over written it.
Yeah I messed up and wiped it accidentally :(. Was going to anyway but would've been nice to have poked around, I'll be more careful next time haha.