Plug In an Ethernet Cable, Take Your Datacenter Offline

New submitter jddj writes: The Next Web reports on a hilarious design failure built into Cisco's 3650 and 3850 Series switches, which TNW terms "A Network Engineer's Worst Nightmare". By plugging in a hooded Ethernet cable, you...well, you'll just have to see the picture and laugh. They write: "The cables, which are sometimes accidentally used in datacenters, feature a protective boot that sticks out over the top to ensure the release tab isn’t accidentally pressed or broken off, rendering the cable useless. That boot would hit the reset button which happened to be positioned directly above port one of the Cisco switch, which causes the device to quietly reset to factory settings."

Comments

Re:i work in enterprise datacenter

[cosm]

blah blah blah

Reality is single device failures bring down large chunks of the net including valuable peers of your "enterprise datacenter"

Of course, sometimes identical cisco models used in redundant tuples also cause outages together after upgrade by common bug that didn't show up in test

so pontificate all you want, you're vulnerable to a lot of bad things

(1) I guarantee if you emailed that explanation to a DC manager you'd be shitcanned. I agree that we are all vulnerable to bad things, but avoidance of a single point of failure device in the DC like op highlights is network ops 101 stuff.

(2) Show me a datacenter that's an all cisco shop. Most are whitebox/greybox now. Welcome to the 21st century. Most "big-data" shops have firmware experts who know their hardware down to the MMU register level and order stuff directly from places like Taiwan with nary a CCIE to be found in corporate ranks.