Month: November 2009

Getting home in 2009

I can sit in a club and decide I want to go home. I can pull out my mobile phone from my pocket, visit a certain website and book a taxi home. I receive a text message when my taxi is near, then stand outside and hop in. This clever use of basic-for-2009 technologies impresses me somewhat. This is what technology should be about!
It may cost a bit more than trying to hail a black cab, but I really appreciate the freedom of paying a couple of quid more for a near-enough chauffeur service. And of course, it avoids having to take a night bus.

Catalyst 6500 Supervisor 32 modular software

I’m on my way back from a few days in Milan, setting up a network for one of our customers. Standard equipment – a pair of Cat6504Es, some ASAs, a couple of ACE4710 load balancers.
As usual with anything I haven’t used before, problems occur. The biggest and most infuriating wasn’t the failed Sup32 (which was eventually replaced by Cisco after quite some work on our supplier’s behalf), but the fact I couldn’t get the Sup32 to boot from the image I’d downloaded.
Here’s what happened – each time I booted, the boot image loaded and spewed the following:
MAC based EOBC installed
Waiting (slot 1) for supervisor to come online in other slot. iteration
= 0
Next Retry will be done after 6 seconds
This repeated for what seemed like an eternity, then the Supervisor crashed and rebooted.
What fixed it? It turns out I had a modular image copied in to flash, not installed. That's not amazingly obvious, especially as the modular image has -mz in its name, and the image I wanted has -jz.
See this article on Cisco IOS Software Modularity on cisco.com for more information.