North American Network Operators Group

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RE: CISCO Easter Egg

  • From: Sean M. Doran
  • Date: Thu Oct 29 19:35:36 1998

| 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.