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.