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Plug In an Ethernet Cable, Take Your Datacenter Offline

Posted by samzenpus on from the not-a-feature dept.

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."

8 of 150 comments (clear)

  1. Easy way.... by blackfeltfedora · · Score: 5, Insightful

    "There’s an easy way to prevent it happening at all, by disabling the button" Another easy way to prevent this from happening would be DON'T BUY THIS SWITCH

    1. Re:Easy way.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Insightful

      Sigh, another "Americans are stupid" joke. Ha Ha, and fuck you.

    2. Re:Easy way.... by Darinbob · · Score: 4, Insightful

      It's not just the hood on the cable that would do this, you could easily press that button with a finger while plugging it in. Or you could press it accidentally while working on a box above or below it. Don't know if you have to hold the button in for 10 seconds before it wipes to factory default, but even without the hood there it seems like a big goof.

      But hey, it's Cisco. They use the design principle that people will buy their stuff anyway so why bother trying.

    3. Re:Easy way.... by Bert64 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      That's even worse, only qualified IT departments would be buying these switches so you have every reason to expect that they *should* research their purchase before buying.
      Normally a reset button needs to be pressed with a pin to prevent accidental pressing...

      --
      http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
  2. Bad in any case by Dan+East · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Regardless of the design of the connector, having the reset button directly above the port is a bad design. It's simply too easy to hit it with your thumb just plugging in or removing a cable. I suppose holding it down for several seconds resets to factory, which is what happens when using cables with the boot. Still, regardless of that more severe problem, it was a bad design in the first place.

    --
    Better known as 318230.
    1. Re:Bad in any case by Drishmung · · Score: 5, Insightful
      Why didn't they at least recess the switch? You really don't want to accidentally press a reset switch. Poor design.

      Not that Cisco hasn't made faux pas before. The 25xx as I recall had socket for a PCMCIA card, but no slot in the front panel to access it! You had to take the case off to do that.

      --
      Protoplasm. Quiet Protoplasm. I like quiet protoplasm.
  3. Re:i work in enterprise datacenter by iggymanz · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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

  4. Re:i work in enterprise datacenter by Antique+Geekmeister · · Score: 4, Insightful

    > If a single device brings down your entire data center, you've got design problems and your architect should be fired or retrained.

    Please: if your data center has the time, and skill, and is willing to take the service interruptions to make the whole setup properly immune to single points of failure, that's great. But very, very few live business environments have that kind of resource, time, and willingness to enable critical switches with robust failover.