[jwhat]

Hi SGI'er,

you can't do much nowadays without Internet connection...

I have been running CISCO 2901 for last 10 years to provide my internet connection, which includes having two Class C IPV4 address spaces.

It was Cisco 857 ASDL before that ...

CISCO have announced End-of-Life for ISR4000 series routers starting in November 2023, so what where only available for minimum of AUD $ 4000, are now popping up on ebay for a as low as AUD $100.

I could not resist, as I have have wanted to do refresh on 2901 for quite some time to get:
- 1. Better Bandwidth to ISP
- 2. Get off End of LIfe HW

Anyone who knows CISCO kit knows that getting the right SW version for 2nd hand Cisco's without service contract is a frustrating thing...

So as part of getting right SW and hardware setup I am now owner of 4 x ISR4300 Routers, from which I have cannibalised parts to create the setup I want:

1 x ISR4331 with builtin 3 x 1GbE + AXV (APP, SEC, VOICE & IP BASE + THRU-PUT Licenses) with 8 x 1GbE POE NIM, 2 x 1GbE NIM, 16 GB DRAM, 16 GB Flash, 200GB MSATA SSD & PVM4-64 Codec Processsor.

So box is now configured to desired state (I needed lots of interfaces as I have 7 subnets on my network)

The interesting thing about this router is that you can run LXC (Linux Container) on the Linux KVM (without need for additional Intel UCS Server Board in the the machine), for things like intrusion detection, SIP PROXY etc, as the router has multi-core Intel X86 CPU in it (we can't get away from Intel nowadays).

I have now copied my CISCO IOS config from the 2901 to the 4331 with updates to handle variation between the IOS & IOS XE versions (XE == linuX Edition , I think).

Only problem now is getting a more current version of IOS XE as the 16.6.4 version now installed has a serious security issue that can be readily exploited via public facing interface :-( .

Once this is addressed (need 16.6.9) I will do physical swap over and get rid of extra 3 x 4331 boxes, cost wise price is still way below new box of this spec from Cisco or reseller.

Building the desired machine configuration via eBay, reminded me of the old SGI days, of starting with low spec Octane and evolving it to full spec Octane2 (which I still use, 20 year on).

I saw that there are some other "got Cisco" box postings in this thread, so maybe IRIX Network should expand forum to include Networking Forum for Cisco, Juniper and other Enterprise networking equipment.

No pictures as routers are pretty boring pizza boxes ;-)

Cheers from Oz,

jwhat/John