Cisco is making it more difficult to use used hardware

Cisco has been fighting second hand sales of their hardware for well over two decades now. There was a flood of surplus gear after the first dotcom crash. Lots of folks, myself included took advantage of those circumstances.<p>Eventually reputable vendors began to pop up. I recall doing a great deal of business (&gt;$1m) with a company called &quot;Network Hardware Resale&quot;. They&#x27;re still in business as &quot;Curvature&quot; and I believe still moving second hand network and server gear as well as providing support.<p>There have been times that I recall when lead times for Cisco gear have exceeded 8 weeks, when I didn&#x27;t have any other options other than using refurbished gear.<p>From my perspective, Cisco is nothing more than a company looking to extract as much money as possible out of Enterprise IT shops. They pretty much gave up the service provider market. IOS has gone a million different directions, and they&#x27;ve been slow to embrace IAC.<p>Back when I was buying refurb gear, I was also buying some new and some officially re-marketed gear. I&#x27;d get support for the chassis and supervisor modules (Cat 6500) so that I could get reliable software updates.<p>My sales rep&#x27;s regional manager sent a threatening letter to the VP of my department with some dire warning about how we were in violation of the law or some such. We all ended up in a meeting in which they produced a list of serial numbers of gear that we&#x27;d sought support on that were supposedly grey-market. We produced the same list of serial numbers on invoices for legit Cisco certified re-marketed equipment. They&#x27;d just failed at record-keeping. My VP was livid and threw them out of his office. Pretty sure they got fired after.<p>Anyway, this is all just a tactic to extract the most money possible. It&#x27;d be irrational to choose Cisco for any new network deployment these days.

All this is going to do is increase the efforts for open source switching firmware. We already have working data plane and control plane for selected systems, but at this point it no longer is some far fetched dream.

This is extremely irritating. I have a fair amount of meraki hardware that was given to me as the reward for a hackathon, and I use it to run my home wifi networks. When the licenses expire the equipment will become completely useless and I’ll have to sell the perfectly functional stuff and replace it with unifi hardware...

How does the phoning home work if they&#x27;re on a network that doesn&#x27;t route to the internet, or where the route to the internet is heavily firewalled? Or does it use a license server? Or is there some other procedure for refreshing the license in that situation? Or can you just not use these routers for that?

&gt; <i>Smart Licensing works differently. Companies can acquire a pool of licenses for their account, which are shared automatically among devices they’ve deployed. Those devices phone home to Cisco regularly for validation, and if they aren’t able to do so will go back to “Evaluation Mode” after one year.</i><p>It doesn&#x27;t sound unusual to me, I feel it&#x27;s just the usual &quot;Enterprise&quot; bullshit, where you have little control or internal knowledge over your equipment, and must follow a restrictive licensing plan and use official support to keep it running. I think the most extreme version is the IBM mainframe computers, if you DRM license module is inoperative, the computer is essentially reduced to a huge piece of useless junk. Other enterprise hardware&#x2F;software is not too restrictive, but still follows the same pattern, such as Oracle products.

This seems like a serious issue for the environment by forcing hardware into landfills.<p>I wonder what the landscape is like in Europe for things like this. I know some countries are more diligent about physical products having a longer useful life than others.

NetAPP has been the same way for decades: you can do what you want with the hardware but the licenses are nontransferable. Since I learned this in 2001 I have not bought any of their hardware.

&gt; Those devices phone home to Cisco regularly for validation, and if they aren’t able to do so will go back to “Evaluation Mode” after one year.<p>I&#x27;d like to see their salesperson try and explain the advantages of this to my CIO.

The article&#x27;s &quot;if you can&#x27;t fix it you don&#x27;t own it&quot; needs to be a mantra that&#x27;s repeated at politicians until we&#x27;re blue in the faces

Ubiquiti needs to invest in their router hardware team; golden opportunity in the market right now. Current gen of their routers are software based while even Cisco&#x27;s SG3XX of routers have TCAM memory and can route at line speed. I really like their approach: cloud based but its your cloud and only if you want it.

The reason for this is counterfeit hardware. All nexus switches, APIC controllers, and UCS hw use TPM to validate software licensing. Invalid license, hardware is locked down. Witnessed this first hand on a bad APIC (ps call your favorite Cisco rep, they will hand out old ACI hardware like candy to a 3 year old)<p>Back in the IOS days there were many stories of calling into smartnet and finding the hardware you bought new from CDW had a serial different from Cisco’s master list. Cisco would cut you off for fear of liability, the owner would dump the hw onto the used market and lather-rinse-repeat with another unsuspecting fowl.

That sort of hardware can last forever. At a previous employer, we had in the office a second-hand Cisco Catalyst 3548XL switch (it still had an asset tag from the previous company the boss had founded). According to the Cisco documentation I looked at back then, not only was that model long out-of-life, but also <i>its successor</i> was long out-of-life. And other than a couple of dead ports, it still worked perfectly; it won&#x27;t surprise me at all if it&#x27;s still in use today.

I&#x27;m sorry for companies that were planning on recovering part of their investment in Cisco hardware by reselling it a couple years down the road.

Maybe I&#x27;m naive but I&#x27;m surprised to learn there is much of a 2nd hand market for 9000 series -class network hardware. I would have assumed that the huge complexity in managing a device like that without cisco support, alongside the difficulty in sourcing replacement parts for an EOL system built around redundancy, would make it very unattractive compared to a newer mid-range alternative. Are people really using unsupported hardware like this in their network?!<p>Disclaimer: I work for Nokia, we also make big switches, I believe we have a similar licensing model for certain products.

So basically Cisco is useless on airgapped networks now?

Is this really any different from what MS does with Windows volume licensing?<p>If you don&#x27;t like the license model of IOS (etc), buy hardware that is supported by free&#x2F;open source OS instead.

By having non-transferable licenses, Cisco will be able to differentiating pricing - ie. Governments pay extra, or non-profits get a discount.

I can only hope that going forward we&#x27;ll see less cisco stuff in datacenters.

&#x27;Pre-owned&#x27; ? Second hand. All this whitewashing of terms is annoying. Just use the term that we all used to begin with.

It&#x27;s not their job to make that easy. Their job is to serve their customers and those folks are not.<p>They have no business relationship with the buyer of second hand Cisco gear.<p>If you don&#x27;t like it, but something else.

The argument for keeping Capitalism is that people like owning stuff and don&#x27;t want to share their property.<p>But capitalism itself is going concentrate ownership, removing it from the vast majority of people. At that point what&#x27;s the point?<p>Speaking of Cisco, if the Soviet Union lasted 10 more years, would we all have IPv6 by now? (Not to say that I want more Soviet Union.)