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Cisco Meraki Loses Customer Data in Engineering Gaffe (cloudpro.co.uk)
Cisco has admitted to losing customer data during a configuration change its enginners applied to its Meraki cloud managed IT service. From a report: Specific data uploaded to Cisco Meraki before 11:20 am PT last Thursday was deleted after engineers created an erroneous policy in a configuration change to its US object storage service, Cisco admitted on Friday. The company did say that the issue has been fixed, and while the error will not affect network operations in most cases, it admitted the faulty policy "but will be an inconvenience as some of your data may have been lost." Cisco hasn't said how many of its 140,000+ Meraki customers have been affected. The deleted data includes custom floor plans, logos, enterprise apps and voicemail greetings found on users' dashboard, systems manager and phones. The engineering team was working over the weekend to find out whether the data can be recovered and potentially build tools so that customers can find out what data has been lost.
For the $ they charge they can't afford backups?
The article reads like a "cloud is bad" point of view because it brings up two unrelated issues from March and July. The last two paragraphs in this article are non sequiturs and should be stricken.
What's a 'Cisco Meraki'? What's a 'cloud managed IT service'? Can we get these described with real words, and not marketing babble?
Are you loving the Cloud yet? I know I am! Of course, I know enough to keep my data where it belongs: on my gear, under my control.
And this is what happens when you entrust your data to someone else's server.
I have exactly one meraki switch that's slated for replacement, I got it very cheap, but had I realized exactly what was entailed in using it I would never have bought it in the first place. I guess I like having entirely local control for my network infrastructure. Even if I can't afford Catalyst, those Linksys-derived SG-series small business switches would probably be better than Meraki if only so that I don't have to pay a subscription just to keep frames forwarding.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Anyone effected by this need only restore from their last local daily back up.
You are making local backups, right? You're not trusting some "cloud storage" company with the only copy of mission critical data, right? I'm sure you aren't, because that wouldn't be foolhardy.
So restore from your most recent local nightly. Problem solved.
They lost the floor plans graphics as well as the Captive portal Splash Pages HTML files.
Took me half an hour to fix. TBH, it's not so bad, the new templates for the splash pages look more modern .
"I've heard nonsense, compared with which that would be as sensible as a dictionary." Through the looking glass and what
is a McDonnell Douglas F-15E. (Sorry, I'm never going to call it Boeing.)
the moon was there for the taking.
50 years later ...
Cisco can fuck anything up, at will, at any time, and brag about it.
This saddens me.
But seriously that is one of the problems with cloud providers is accountability if something does go wrong. There was a pretty bad outage on amazons s3 services due to an employee fuckup as well. At least when companies ran their own servers the outage would generally only affect that one company instead of hundreds or thousands.
Just my .02
A little while ago, I inherited a network form a-person-who-called-him-self-an-admin-but-was-clueless.
He had started replacing old campus switches with Meraki units. Meraki is a marketing company that is owned by Cisco. Meraki hardware runs Linux, but they've locked it down to the point of uselessness. They prey on those in the business who have no idea what they are doing by offering a "Simple" solution. They are worth staying away from for many reasons, some of which I'll list here:
A. Technical support with NO tools to provide support.
4 support calls to Meraki.
0 successful solutions.
1 actual bug.
1 email back with a link to a PDF of an advertising spec sheet.
1 "Make a Wish" button.
1 "lesson in Pcap" from a person who had no idea how to interpret the results.
B. No support for critical protocols.
- CDP, nope.
- LLDP, somewhat. If it fails, then they have you run Pcap. Silly since I know what's being sent to the switch and know how to diagnose what is going through my network. I needed to know what the switch was doing with the data once it got there.
- 802.1s (MSTP), not at all. In fact, I had an "engineer" tell me that He would be "surprised if I had an actual use case to implement it." I responded by pasting a URL to the help section of Cisco's mainline web site back to him explaining its' uses and how to set it up on actual Cisco hardware.
C. Near complete lack of any ability whatsoever to debug what the switch was doing.
- Their solution. You must not need what you are asking for. Did I mention Pcap?
D: A Faustian contract.
- No better way to put it. The switches run Linux, but if you don't pay them they stop working at the end of the contract.
- It's near impossible to actually predict when your devices will expire because of the complexity of the contract.
- They provide an online "calculator" to help you figure out why a ten year support contract on a switch is actually only 9 months long.
D. Greasy sales people.
I received an email from them the other month telling me that Cisco was going to make them double all their prices, but "If I acted now..."
End game.
My response was simple. "It's ok, we're upgrading to Dell."
Their response, "Sorry to hear that, if there's anything we can do..."
Me, "Tell me about your upgrade program to mainline Cisco hardware."
Meraki, "We don't have a program like that."
Me, "It's ok, Dell does."
(Well, it might not, but I *had* to tell them that.)
We scrapped the last bit of Meraki equipment last week. Seems like it might have been pretty good timing on our part.
_Dan
I can pretty much echo Dan's experience.
They once pushed a patch to a customers Meraki switches which cause packet loss for their phone system (it was a call centre).
I asked for the release notes to see the known issues, and bug fixes. No dice, "we don't offer release notes", it's all secret and you are not to know.
They refused to accept their patches did anything to cause the problem.
Again they pcap'd data and said all was fine, but would provide no diagnostic as to what the switches were actually doing.
Asked them to roll back to previous version, they refused. I forced them to escalate and I ended up speaking with the head of Europe for their support.
I had to wait for the Californians to wake up so he could have a conference call to authorise a roll back.
They refused to roll back because they don't support said version anymore, and have no reports of any such issues with the new firmware.
2 weeks and the customer was pissed they refused to do anything to fix it. Swapped out with HP, and guess what, phones working fine.
I'll never, ever recommend Meraki. Utter shit support service.
you haven't already forgotten that all their hardware and services were compromised by NSA and CIA, did you? Do you have anything that should not be leaked to American competitors? Then don't use Cisco.
We run a bunch of SG500s and they are fantastic. Cisco has stated that these are not linksys derived. They cut that company loose quite a while ago. All of their small business line is now designed and engineered by Cisco engineers.
The switches are very similar in operation to the Catalyst line - but without some features like VTP - and they come with lifetime replacement warranties.
For a small school like us they are a great way to run Cisco without paying a ton for smartnet.
I'll let the other bits of your rant go but this one is not true. It's pretty straight forward. Go into Organization -> License Info and it says right there the date when everything expires. And since everything co-terminates, your entire infrastructure goes tits up at the same time.
True that. I should have ranted more clearly.
I really meant that part of my message to be about budgeting for the care and feeding of Meraki devices.
If you purchase a license for 10 switches, the clock starts ticking when you buy the license, not when you activate the switches.
If you activate "claim" only 9 switches, the clock still counts 10
Remove a device, the clock is still ticking as if you had ten.
If then you were to buy five more licenses for a completely different (Let's say less expensive) product, then it would be averaged in to the 10 (not 8) switches you currently have on-line.
Say those five licenses were for one year use of an access point and the ten were for more expensive switches.
You could find your one year for the access points chewed down to a few months or less because of the way they do things.
It's really next to impossible to budget for their product without using their on-line calculator. Add their price doubling on top of that... I wish their users the best of luck!
The red dude downstairs could learn a few things from their legal department.
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Oh yeah, I agree. I just activated a switch with a 6 year (one year free) license and my end date for all my equipment went forward by a whopping one week. And yeah, it sat in the box for two months before I could get to it -- and I did notice the license started at purchase date.
Then again, I like it because it forces my employer's hand. Too often in the past they've let service contracts expire despite my pleading because they say they are comfortable with the risks, then when a failure happens they hold ME responsible because they say I didn't adequately explain the risk allegedly. If I try to show evidence I did, then I'm seen as making excuses and not being a problem solver.
There's no grey area with Meraki. You don't pay, it stops working. Period.
Also, I'm not in a big shop. I do it all so I'm truly a jack of all trades, master of none. I've had regular Cisco kit in the past and I swear that shit is way more complicated to make work than it really has to be. I don't want to have to be a CCIE just to make my network work. I just want it to work.
Like I currently have a Cisco UCS 560 phone system that I need to replace -- but I'm certainly not getting Meraki MC now. So I've learned THAT lesson at least! :-)
I don't get the criticisms I'm seeing. They don't match my experience in any respect. There are a few things that are lacking or need improvement, but when isn't that the case? If there's a perfect product out there, I've never seen or heard of it.