
Cisco advisory: Ethernet cable may press factory reset switch - JoshTriplett
http://thenextweb.com/insider/2015/09/07/this-hilarious-cisco-fail-is-a-network-engineers-worst-nightmare/
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technion
I'm lost on why any enterprise kit at all has a reset button. This isn't a
Netgear router where the ISP regularly asks people to "press reset" when they
forget their password.

I was happy to use a console cable and send a break when I rarely needed to
reset Cisco kit. Why these sorts of buttons ever existed I don't understand.

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aexaey
General idea here is that when you have a problematic piece of gear in
somebody else's DC across the country, it is usually easier and faster to ask
"remote hands" to press and hold the button, compared to asking to get a
laptop, serial cable, fire up a terminal, join webex with his laptop and only
then try to send break or whatever.

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exabrial
Paper clip reset buttons are so 1990?

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scintill76
> The cables, which are sometimes accidentally used in datacenters, feature a
> protective boot that sticks out over the top to ensure the release tab isn’t
> accidentally pressed or broken off

Is this just a typo (misplaced "accidentally"?), or is there really a reason
such cables shouldn't be used in datacenters?

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eridius
It just seems like a poorly written article. Later on it says

> _Such a situation could cause a problem in any size datacenter, where these
> switches and cables are commonly used_

which seems to contradict the "accidentally". Similarly, this bit is
ungrammatical:

> _It’s amazing that Cisco didn’t catch this before the device was released,
> let alone that the ‘fix’ for the problem which suggests using a different
> cable or cutting off the boot._

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buffoon
This sort of stuff happens all the time. Usually people just facepalm and get
on with it rather than making a headline...

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sohkamyung
I'm not sure. There might be two design issues here:

1) placing the reset button directly above a port, making it easier to be hit
by anything that happens to poke up above the port. Moving the button to one
side would be logical.

2) making the reset button stick out. On consumer routers, the reset switch is
usually recessed in a hole to make it harder to accidentally hit. Of course,
the requirement for a reset switch for a device in a datacentre might be
different.

Doing 1) or 2) would prevent the problem.

~~~
buffoon
Of course. However DC kit has a long history of fail. Even old sun kit would
drop to the monitor if you yanked the console cable. This on one occasion
killed an entire e4500 cluster we had running oracle which failed over and
then resumed crashing both instances. This happened due to a port glitch on
the console server.

Perhaps I'm just desensitised to the issue.

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sohkamyung
The Cisco Field Notice implies that it is a problem with excessively large
protectors: "Numerous types of snagless cables are available. However, most
are designed in such a way that the protective device is less prominent and/or
held more tightly to the tab, which prevents the aforementioned drawbacks."

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donkeyd
It's an advisory from 2013. I wonder why this is surfacing nearly two years
later.

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ytch
Yeah, I am also curious about this.

[http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/support/docs/field-
notices/636/...](http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/support/docs/field-
notices/636/fn63697.html)

