[20942] in North American Network Operators' Group
RE: CISCO Easter Egg
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Sean M. Doran)
Thu Oct 29 19:40:49 1998
From: "Sean M. Doran" <smd@clock.org>
To: CMartin@mercury.balink.com, horke@regio.net, smd@clock.org
Cc: nanog@merit.edu
Date: Thu, 29 Oct 1998 16:18:18 -0800
| Sean,
|
| Why would they use this feature for that purpose? To fake a router
| crash in order to load new software? Interesting way of "breaking the
| rules."
|
| Chris
Well, despite many strangenesses in my former company, operations
never actually imposed a maintenance window along the lines of
a competitor's "only Thursdays between midnight and four a.m. local time"
which straitjacketed the people who were trying to build a network that
would cope with the kind of growth it was undergoing at the time.
So, one possibility was to wait for things to explode and then change
the broken procedures, and the other possibility was load up new code
in all routers in advance of the next maintenance window, and then if
it became necessary, tactically crash ones that started suffering the
worst problems.
I don't think I ever actually used the knob, but I know at least
two people who did.
Sean.
