As a teenager, during an argument with my dad, to cut the tension, I cut him off and blurted out "Token Ring's dead, Dad. Get over it!". We both had a good laugh. 😂
Ever since discovering this channel my network has been overhauled twice. Built an opnsense router, swapped over to proxmox, have a symmetrical gigabit fiber install coming to replace the coax 1000/100 and I'm running new CAT6 drops to every room. Glad I finally got the motivation again because it's been so worth it. I appreciate the inspiration. Now I need to find a good deal on a rack and then afterwards forget my pin numbers to my cards.
@@clabretroI don't have open sense but I'm like you, I'm constantly tweaking my network and looking at my Ethernet drops that run along the floor into my closet like.. I need to run these under the house but I don't have a rack and dont want to go to the damp cobweb filled cramped crawl space
Dude DON'T EVER STOP making these !!! You're networking videos rock. Each one is bringing back so many memories from 20 years ago. Keep up the awesome work. 😊👍🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥
I was a student of computer science in 2009... there was several chapters in the networking class about token ring... Half as much as the number of chapters for ethernet networking. The 7 layers of the OSI model, There was a chapter dedicated to serial networking which as you are demonstrating is how these routers communicated with each other... I just found your channel recently, and I am touchingly blasted with nostalgia working as a Certified Networking Technician in the early 2010s.
It kinda reminds me of the Intel Flash logo. (Intel Flash chips were used to store the BIOS on some 90s PCs like mid 90s Toshiba laptops, if I recall correctly)
@@kbhasiI just assumed it was the same logo. But I tried to look up the logos just now to compare, and the results are all modern Intel logos and logos for The Flash, not Intel Flash logos 😔 even with boolean, even on DDG
@@kaitlyn__L Yeah, I think it's obscure. I remember taking apart a Toshiba 440CDT and 480CDT to repair both and saw those Intel Flash chips, which I later assumed held the BIOS.
@@kbhasi I feel like I’d have to go seeking out a history page or a video of someone taking apart an early MP3 plate for total confirmation lol. But I know the one you mean and definitely went “oh it’s that original logo” when I saw it. I don’t think anyone else would make it back then bc Intel invented it, and was licensing it to others which included the logo. So, yeah. That’s a big part of why we still say flash rather than generically “NAND storage” tbh. Intel was doing everything to push that name and logo back then. It’s basically a generic trademark now (not sure if legally), which I know companies aren’t fond of, but in my mind that’s the ultimate mark of success for a trademark.
@@kaitlyn__L I did take a photo many years ago of the chips but lost it as I only posted it to a private Facebook group. I may still have the photo buried deep in my NAS, though.
This was like a walk down memory lane. I worked for Cisco for 22 years in several roles, and the 7200 + many others were managed by several different EMS and NMSs that I was the product manager for. Just about every building on Tasman had a lab filled with hundreds of routers, switches, etc... It was a grand time to be working at Cisco.
Great old router and definitely legendary status in the industry. They were rock solid and many of them only stopped working once they were retired. Good video!
This video brought back memories. I joined SprintLink (one of the Tier 1 ISPs at the time) in 1998. Token ring was on its way out but we still had to keep it alive for some low speed edge routers. Most of the routers were 7500 and GSR. I think it wasn't until a few years later that we adopted 7200s for BGP route reflectors. Good times.
Yikes, you guys must have had some kind of special support contract from Cisco on those, or just not cared. The EOL docs on those show last maintenance release in 2015 with last support date of late 2017. The enterprise I support right now has some old iron at various locations, and even with multiple tens of thousands of devices on support contracts they hold firm to those EOL dates.
@@mrfrenzy. Fiber cable is much cheaper than copper, because there's no copper in them and copper is quite expensive these days. If it made economic sense to run copper to somewhere in the first place, it makes sense to replace it with fiber now and yank out the old copper and sell it. North America is really starting to see some major investment in FTTP finally - only like 15 to 20 years behind more progressive places that rolled out fiber decades ago. Even Australia will go FTTP eventually - even if somehow you're further behind than north america is
We must be close in age. When I was in grade school I remember friends talking about T1 as being the fastest thing to envy. Though I wasn't interested in networking until about a decade into my career. That 2821 is quite nostalgic. I previously had a used 2811 that I used when studying for the CCNA. Unfortunately I never had much direct experience with token ring, so I'd love to see it up and running.
Just binged all three of the Cisco episodes (I don’t watch your videos in order, just when I feel like it). Super interesting stuff. Looking forward to the next installment!
That 7206 was just slightly before my time. I worked with the 2600/2800 but you never work with production routers much as messing inside those in production will get one fired. Great video thank you for the effort
Had a CISCO CCNA class in high school (circa 2000). Had to configure using the command line and configure network connections on the hardware (IE - making a T1 line) - which was next generation compared to this. I've forgotten all of it. It's amazing that you can learn things and forget them.
Use it or lose it. To keep with the computing theme, your brain is like a cache - only keeps the things you access. The upshot - if you decide to learn something again after forgetting it, it’s easier the second time.
Heh, I also took a CCNA class in high school in probably 2000 - I remember thinking back then already that it was laughable connecting routers over back to back serial cables, with those big chonker v.35 connectors in the middle. Even the school had a cable modem at that point. I also remember the 'teacher' knew absolutely jack squat about the course, and was essentially just there as a babysitter while we went through the course material, the practical stuff, and did the online quizzes ourselves.
I really love this format of playing around with the equipment and figuring things out along the way... I feel like we all learn a lot more about this equipment and provides for good entertainment too!
We ran three of them at the ISP I worked for about twenty years ago - I wish I could have held on to at least one of them when decommissioned a dozen years ago.
Nice trip down memory lane - I oversaw several of these being put into action over the years and never witnessed any failures. A running joke was that VXR stood for "very expensive router".
Yeah we used to use them to terminate adsl subscribers and we would max them out by putting 2 ds3s cards on one side and one oc3 in the other. With that configuration we would then run into both the maximum number of subinterfaces and the maximum number of interfaces you could configure on a system. We could only save the config to flash and it had to be at night when there wasn't much traffic on them.
Them doing that reminded me of 2000s Nokia phone packaging for unlocked variants (and variants where the phones weren't repackaged into service provider packaging)
That was a fun watch. I got my start in the ISP space and we used these 7206 routers with channelized DS3 cards hooked up to adtran muxes. This allowed us to run a whole mess of T1's out of each 7206. Later we had the fancy NPE's that had fiber interfaces on the NPE to not use up bandwidth points for the other PA cards. I may even have some configs from those days. I had lots of fun with T1 multilinks back then.
Oh dear, this brings me back. Great to see a retro networking video. 😁 We used the 7200s as PE routers for our MPLS customers. Also early on it was used as BRAS and the ADSL DSLAMs would connect over ATM OC-3. The E1/T1 cards were fractional so they could carry many customer connections. For example one customer would have a 64 kbps leased line and use one time slot, another customer had 256 kbps and used 4 time slots. All terminating on the same card. Later there was even a fractional OC-3 card which could do sub rate down to single DS0s (I remember it was a very expensive card!). There were also pure POSIP cards - Packet Over SONET/SDH which we used back when SONET/SDH was still a thing. Over all it's was a very versatile platform. The same cards were also usable on the 7500 IIRC. Hope you'll get your hands on the legendary GSR as well. 😉
I am working with Cisco devices since the year 2000. Every router model you have shown here look very familiar to me 😀. Looking forward to see other legacy network techniques in future videos.
Love these videos! I can't click fast enough when I see you or The Serial Port upload a video. As a newer Network Admin it's so helpful to see how the roads led us to where we're at now. Keep it up, man!
I had a VXR with the NPE-G2 installed in it a while back. Interesting tidbit on the G2: it uses the fastest PowerPC 7448 CPU ever produced. The 7400 series of PowerPC CPUs is most widely known as the "G4" as used in Macintosh computers from the era.
Very cool! This router is before my time when I started my networking career. Funny enough though, for the last year been trying to move a T1 off one of these in our data center…
I worked on a pair of 7206VXRs at my first actual network engineer ISP job. One trick to getting those bottom cards out is once you get a little movement, take a couple of flat screwdrivers and lever each side of the card simultaneously. You can actually pull the handle clean off if you yank on it when it's in a rack.
This message was transmitted by a 7206VXR that runs my home network. I've got the NPE-G1and actually only run the GE ports on it. Nit-pick: The configuration is in NVRAM, not on the PC cards; they're only for operating system image storage. I've been meaning to replace the 7206 with a 892 for ages, but the VXR is so conveniently reliable!
We actually had one of those 7200VXRs at my last job. It was serving a Comcast Metro E 100/100 connection and splitting it between 3 tenants. It was retired when we upgraded to 300/300 a few years later. I knew nothing about how that device worked or was configured, but it's interesting to see it now.
Crazy seeing the thumbnail (which is what brought me in)… Then hearing you mention trying to get a T1 hooked up while showing a 2600 - brings me back to the first dialup ISP our group ever setup… Must watch this for laughs…
What a cute little router. I know somebody who worked on the Cisco BFR (Big F-ing Router) about 20 years ago and I got to peek in a dev lab once. I didn't know anything about what I was looking at, all I remember is it was the loudest room younger me had ever been in.
I've got a 2821 running in my rack for my home network in a one arm bandit config to route between my vlans. good stuff, I'm loving all your new videos, this is becoming one of my fave channels to keep up with!
I was working at a college around '97 time, and we had fast ethernet for the workstations, most of the servers and several stacked SCSI towers for AXIS token ring CDROM servers.
I worked with and on these units for a decade or so. There were all kinds of rules around what cards you could use based on the different NPE's that you could install on it. Fun fact, the original Cisco CMTS were based on this style of chassis. So they were essentially just VXR's with broadband Upstream and Downstream cards in it. Pretty fun stuff, and that might tie into the video stuff that you do here on the channel.
hahahah, when I saw the stuck card I _knew_ it was going to be jammed in there upside down. the networking lab I worked in when I was in high school had several 7200 series routers, and the flash cards getting jammed in upside down was a common occurrence.
I was a Network/Systems Engineer that worked almost exclusively on Cisco equipment. I stopped working in the field about 12 years ago when customers were driving me crazy expecting me to know everything about all things Cisco - routers, switches, firewalls, VoIP, etc.... The 7206 was relatively easy to work on compared to the earlier equipment like the igs, cgs, mgs and the ags... In the early days they were known as "multi-protocol routers" because they could not only run the TCPIP protocol stack, but also others like AppleTalk, XNS, DECNet, etc.... It was an interesting time to work in the growing computer networking / Internet field.....
The v35 card will still work. The blown cap is likely a filter cap and it will run without it!! It might make it unstable on long leads but short leads after the breakout adaptor will probably work or at worst you loose 1 of the 8 channels.. thats why it shows it booted up and green light. If the card was not functional at all the card will prevent power up and not have a green ready light. So replace the cap because it's needed for stability or for 1 channel to function properly but the rest of card is working well enough to boot.
@@clabretro yeah systems like this are all about redundancy and super stable connections so it's probably functional and tested fine because it works in the basic system tests. Like motherboards with dud caps are still still functional but slowly becoming unstable over time as more filter caps fail. Same as tiny caps on CPUs or phone motherboards you knock 1 off and the Device still seems to work with our it lol I used to think why have these parts if they are not needed but as I found out it's usually just for stability of signals or to make sure it can deliver consistent voltage with out getting to low making the CPUs unstable.. so it needs the cap to be perfectly stable but it is likely still working.
This was the last router I worked on as a network engineer. Went into management after that. Don't remember much about it. I spent most of my time with IGS, MGS and AGS+ routers.
The 10mbit card has the AMD LANCE (Local Area Network Controller - Ethernet). Very common chip back in the day. Used by Sun, DEC, Commodore, Sony and others.
I have to admit, i was yawning slightly thinking about this one port T1 setup but i made it till the end and you dropped the 8-port bonded setup bomb so fast my head waa spinning. Youve got my attention now! 😀
awesome... this and the vxr or what they were called, were hot and too expensive for playing until the very day they were to old to get :( always liked them and compensated with other devices... Absolutely great channel. I wish i could have done this back before i lost my collection, so wondeful to see people take apart and appreciate old tech!
these were outrageously expensive when new, especially a tricked out VXR. i'll make sure to cover some cost overviews the next time I get these in a video!
I got to travel all over the country setting up a network I designed. MCI and Norlite frame relay over native T1 and some ISDN PRI with BRI backup links.
One of the companies I worked for was completely wired for token ring. It was interesting to see it all still in place well after it was no longer relevant.
I work for a large public library system and when I started there 11 years ago the core router was a 7200 with 3 ATM cards and 2 DS3 cards… that thing was fun to replace.
As a teen I always wanted a T1 line…. Now I have a 2 gb Fiber so I think I’m set. 🤣 but definitely following this channel for networking, the cable making segment alone was incredibly useful.
I always love watching your videos... Messing around with old ish enterprise equipment noone has ever seen before and doing impractical stuff is always fun... As a neat bonus, most of your videos are also educational :)
The first real "IT" job I had was working at a company as a tech support person, we had a token ring network, with a Banyan Vines backbone - connecting all the different rings. We used either IBM PC's or Compac Lugable's as work stations.
as someone who's doing network administration , i'm glad that all cisco work has always been outsorced to guys who actually know it, as we (the rest) don't even want to come close to a cisco router. during an interview for a IT job, after they told me "we use just cisco equipment and config over terminal" i simply thanked and walked away haha
T1 had an almost mythical status far beyond when it was truly the King of the Hill. Even in the days of Cable and VDSL, I remember lusting over a T1 with others. I think it was a combination of the guaranteed speed (cable being multi access and DSL depending highly on distance to the CO and how oversubscribed the phone company wanted to be) and the rock steady latency that made it so desirable compared to more consumer focused options. But beyond that, I think it just became almost a legendary nerd achievement to have access to a T1. It was a very weird time. Haha 😂
There were a well spread misunderstanding amoung youngsters that T1 meant 10Mbit/s and T3 meant 100Mbit/s. (T1: 1.544Mbit/s, T3: 44.736Mbit/s, E1: 2.048Mbit/s, E3: 34.368Mbit/s. I'm not very samiliar with the SONET/T-carrier system, but in the european system one E3 or 21 E1 can be muxed into a VC3. A VC4 can carry three VC3. An STM-x (x= 1, 4, 16 or 64) can carry x VC4.)
I ran my isp from 1995 to 2012 in these. I had 2 7206 vxr as I had FE interfaces. I remember doing bgp with 8 T1s y til I went OC3. I don’t remember exactly when I bought my first 7206 but I ran my isp as a business from 1985 until I sold it in 2012.
another fantastic video! I love this ...these machines are fascinating!and I like the different looks and logos ect....the line about being more concerned about the token ring than family is priceless!
Speaking of the Serial interface card, we actually use more modern Cisco 4221 ISR routers with NIM-16A cards as terminal servers in some Datacenters. Each NIM-16A card has 2 8 port connectors, and with an "octopus" cable lets us connect to the console port of equipment throughout the Datacenter. Each 4221 can support 2 cards, so we can connect 32 serial devices to each one. The 4221 has anemic bandwidth by modern standards (35Mbps with base licensing) but that's more than enough for this use case. There's also the option of rolling your own serial console server, but the 4221 is a solid platform running IOS-XE that we already have plenty of automation workflows for, AAA for authentication, VPN Tunnels, ACLs for user access to the right devices, etc. etc. Not to mention they sip power in this particular configuration. It's a niche use case, but great for ensuring access to a couple of racks worth of gear out of band. We're definitely not the only large enterprise out there doing it.
I had two 7206 VXRs with NPE G2s sitting in my garage up until 3 months ago when I did an e-waste cleanup. They were border routers in our backup DC for years until we upgraded to ASR’s. I liked the platform much better than the new stuff and iOS XE. The end of when Cisco made the best networking equipment.
We used a bunch of the toasters across various branches of our telco. At some point, we had an entire room just piled up with 7206s full of E1 interfaces for dialup internet after that had all been torn down. One of the ones we ran for yeeeeears could only fit a single power supply because someone had used it as a step to reach the cable raceway above the rack and caved in the entire chassis, especially the slot the (at the time empty) second PSU would go in.
So cool to see a fully modular router, I would put the newer big 2800 as your "main basement-net router" and then have the 7206 run your T1 and token-ring stuff...maybe have the VXR as a failover haha
Please! Do more with Token Ring! Back when I was in primary school I inherited a token ring router. It powered up, but it was the only piece of token ring hardware I ever had so I couldn't experiment with it. I would be thrilled to see a functional token ring network. Like you, clabretro, It has stuck with me since.
I was given a 7206 with a couple 8 port 10Base-T cards, a 4 port T1 card, and 2 others that I believe had various serial ports on them. I messed with it for a while and then ended up selling it on eBay in 2007 I believe. Someone bought it for an ISP in Central America. I hope it brought internet to some people who would have otherwise been unable to get it.
man that brings back memories of my ISP days with DSL. we had a 7206 running about 4000 DSL customers for the longest time. i believe we had a 2610 in there too at the headend. the 7206 was DHCP/DSL/Routing for all of the customers. that was about 19 years ago
thats so awesome. PIX routers were literally the thing that saved the internet. Id be curious if you have come across any Super Micro systems of this vintage. Their semi-more recent stuff is extremely fun. I have one running my homelab rn
Thanks! Love that R720, and that R510 especially. But there are probably better options now, I need a newer NAS and I'll probably do a video on whatever I figure out.
Well best of luck in your search, my NAS is currently an old think station with a Xeon in it that I transplanted into an old rackmount case, the computer components and HDD's are second hand from a computer recycling center I used to work at, case is from a boy's and girls club that was recycling some old stuff. So I've been looking for an upgrade as well. Looking forward to what you find out. And a more in depth video on the R720 and R510 would be super cool, maybe the pros and cons or something like that as well. Thanks man! @@clabretro
Aw man, token ring! I was in college in 2009 and my dorm still had those connectors you showed in the jpeg (token ring to Ethernet). People would call the connectors baluns ("balanced-to-unbalanced"). I never knew the real name, but from the URL are apparently "hermaphroditic connector".
Your comment reminded me of an article I read many years ago where the author mentioned that the secondary school, high school, or college (I can't remember which) they attended used Token Ring networking at the time (which I think was the early '90s).
I remember still being at school and doing "work experience" at a local manufacturing firm in the IT dept. Must have been 1998, they were still using token ring 6mbit/s over Coaxial cable 😁
Wow, what a feeling of nostalgia, I've still got four chassis with two NPE and a smattering of PA. I used to run these things at ISPs I worked at, and rescued the ones I have from a friend when they were swapping out their PPP tunnel endpoints. I had a plan to make my own lab, but never used them, you want some? I've got 2500 series, 7200s, 3600s and a bunch of fast ethernet switches.
An idea for when you get around to finalizing the setup: Get an ASCII logo and put it into the MOTD along with the obligatory unauthorized access warnings. Also, I really appreciate these networking videos - they remind me of when I took my CCNA and studied for CCIE back in the 2000s. :) Oh, and I have a solution to your RUclips name that you've mentioned: Can you "rebrand" as C-Lab Retro? For a while, I thought that was the channel name. :P
Generally where to find the file to boot from in Cisco devices is part of the configuration, so it not finding the file in slot0: automatically isn't actually unexpected behavior. This allows you to keep multiple versions of IOS and swap between them easily for troubleshooting, upgrading, etc. It also allows you to have multiple cards with backup files in case you have a hardware or file corruption error.
I worked in the Cisco support lab in 2012 and these were some of the worst to deal with, squeezing in the back and pulling out the NPE almost always resulted in scraping your hand. Still a good amount of customers around the world were using these in production at the time.
As a teenager, during an argument with my dad, to cut the tension, I cut him off and blurted out "Token Ring's dead, Dad. Get over it!". We both had a good laugh. 😂
ROFL!!
😂
😂
FDDI 🎤
Straight for the jugular! FDDI Forever
Looks like we are in for a treat, 46 mins of sweet old networking and routing!
Ever since discovering this channel my network has been overhauled twice. Built an opnsense router, swapped over to proxmox, have a symmetrical gigabit fiber install coming to replace the coax 1000/100 and I'm running new CAT6 drops to every room. Glad I finally got the motivation again because it's been so worth it. I appreciate the inspiration.
Now I need to find a good deal on a rack and then afterwards forget my pin numbers to my cards.
haha that's awesome
Opnsense is so much fun
@@clabretroI don't have open sense but I'm like you, I'm constantly tweaking my network and looking at my Ethernet drops that run along the floor into my closet like.. I need to run these under the house but I don't have a rack and dont want to go to the damp cobweb filled cramped crawl space
I only pay for the 150/150 package rather than the full 1000/1000 but full symmetrical internet has been wonderful. I would hate to go back
If I ever get hit by a bus my wife would have no idea how to fix the internet connection in my house when it breaks.
Dude DON'T EVER STOP making these !!! You're networking videos rock. Each one is bringing back so many memories from 20 years ago. Keep up the awesome work. 😊👍🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥
thank you!
I was a student of computer science in 2009... there was several chapters in the networking class about token ring... Half as much as the number of chapters for ethernet networking. The 7 layers of the OSI model, There was a chapter dedicated to serial networking which as you are demonstrating is how these routers communicated with each other... I just found your channel recently, and I am touchingly blasted with nostalgia working as a Certified Networking Technician in the early 2010s.
That FLASH logo on the Cisco card is badass.
It kinda reminds me of the Intel Flash logo.
(Intel Flash chips were used to store the BIOS on some 90s PCs like mid 90s Toshiba laptops, if I recall correctly)
@@kbhasiI just assumed it was the same logo.
But I tried to look up the logos just now to compare, and the results are all modern Intel logos and logos for The Flash, not Intel Flash logos 😔 even with boolean, even on DDG
@@kaitlyn__L
Yeah, I think it's obscure. I remember taking apart a Toshiba 440CDT and 480CDT to repair both and saw those Intel Flash chips, which I later assumed held the BIOS.
@@kbhasi I feel like I’d have to go seeking out a history page or a video of someone taking apart an early MP3 plate for total confirmation lol. But I know the one you mean and definitely went “oh it’s that original logo” when I saw it. I don’t think anyone else would make it back then bc Intel invented it, and was licensing it to others which included the logo. So, yeah.
That’s a big part of why we still say flash rather than generically “NAND storage” tbh. Intel was doing everything to push that name and logo back then. It’s basically a generic trademark now (not sure if legally), which I know companies aren’t fond of, but in my mind that’s the ultimate mark of success for a trademark.
@@kaitlyn__L
I did take a photo many years ago of the chips but lost it as I only posted it to a private Facebook group. I may still have the photo buried deep in my NAS, though.
This was like a walk down memory lane. I worked for Cisco for 22 years in several roles, and the 7200 + many others were managed by several different EMS and NMSs that I was the product manager for. Just about every building on Tasman had a lab filled with hundreds of routers, switches, etc... It was a grand time to be working at Cisco.
that's awesome! a video on that VXR coming soon as well
retired a pair of these in 2020... really didn't think they'd been around since 1996, i remember them going in new!
Great old router and definitely legendary status in the industry. They were rock solid and many of them only stopped working once they were retired. Good video!
Oldschool Cisco stuff on a Sunday morning has started to become a new favorite 😁 Never seen these old 7200's before
This video brought back memories. I joined SprintLink (one of the Tier 1 ISPs at the time) in 1998. Token ring was on its way out but we still had to keep it alive for some low speed edge routers. Most of the routers were 7500 and GSR. I think it wasn't until a few years later that we adopted 7200s for BGP route reflectors. Good times.
"We're just messin' around in the basement" 😄
Up until 2020 I was working for an ISP in Australia where we used 7206 with G2 cards as our core and edge routers.
Still have 2 running in my shop.
Yikes, you guys must have had some kind of special support contract from Cisco on those, or just not cared. The EOL docs on those show last maintenance release in 2015 with last support date of late 2017. The enterprise I support right now has some old iron at various locations, and even with multiple tens of thousands of devices on support contracts they hold firm to those EOL dates.
What kind of outdated ISP was using this stuff as their "backbone" in 2020? Jeez, the ISP I use uses multiple 100gbps rings on DWDM as their backbone!
@gorak9000 some places in the world still has lots of adsl with very long cables that are not economical to replace.
@@mrfrenzy. Fiber cable is much cheaper than copper, because there's no copper in them and copper is quite expensive these days. If it made economic sense to run copper to somewhere in the first place, it makes sense to replace it with fiber now and yank out the old copper and sell it. North America is really starting to see some major investment in FTTP finally - only like 15 to 20 years behind more progressive places that rolled out fiber decades ago. Even Australia will go FTTP eventually - even if somehow you're further behind than north america is
You're really bringing back some memories! When I was in the carrier space, we had both 7200s and VXRs. fed by DS3s. Swapped them out with 7600s.
"That's probably more than you ever wanted to know about that" -> could really be the tagline for the whole channel TBH and I'm here for it.
😂
We must be close in age. When I was in grade school I remember friends talking about T1 as being the fastest thing to envy. Though I wasn't interested in networking until about a decade into my career. That 2821 is quite nostalgic. I previously had a used 2811 that I used when studying for the CCNA.
Unfortunately I never had much direct experience with token ring, so I'd love to see it up and running.
Just binged all three of the Cisco episodes (I don’t watch your videos in order, just when I feel like it). Super interesting stuff. Looking forward to the next installment!
That 7206 was just slightly before my time. I worked with the 2600/2800 but you never work with production routers much as messing inside those in production will get one fired. Great video thank you for the effort
It's always fun watching a pro configuring Cisco networking equipment!!
Had a CISCO CCNA class in high school (circa 2000). Had to configure using the command line and configure network connections on the hardware (IE - making a T1 line) - which was next generation compared to this. I've forgotten all of it. It's amazing that you can learn things and forget them.
Use it or lose it. To keep with the computing theme, your brain is like a cache - only keeps the things you access.
The upshot - if you decide to learn something again after forgetting it, it’s easier the second time.
Heh, I also took a CCNA class in high school in probably 2000 - I remember thinking back then already that it was laughable connecting routers over back to back serial cables, with those big chonker v.35 connectors in the middle. Even the school had a cable modem at that point. I also remember the 'teacher' knew absolutely jack squat about the course, and was essentially just there as a babysitter while we went through the course material, the practical stuff, and did the online quizzes ourselves.
I really love this format of playing around with the equipment and figuring things out along the way... I feel like we all learn a lot more about this equipment and provides for good entertainment too!
thanks!!
We ran three of them at the ISP I worked for about twenty years ago - I wish I could have held on to at least one of them when decommissioned a dozen years ago.
Nice trip down memory lane - I oversaw several of these being put into action over the years and never witnessed any failures. A running joke was that VXR stood for "very expensive router".
I've heard that joke before, and based on the pricing I've found it's very accurate haha
Ah - the dreaded points calculation on the 7200. I had forgotten about that, but I certainly remember doing it back in the day.
Yeah we used to use them to terminate adsl subscribers and we would max them out by putting 2 ds3s cards on one side and one oc3 in the other. With that configuration we would then run into both the maximum number of subinterfaces and the maximum number of interfaces you could configure on a system. We could only save the config to flash and it had to be at night when there wasn't much traffic on them.
I didn't forget. That backplane is PCI and has a very finite bandwidth. The VXR is faster, but it still has bus bandwidth limits.
When you add gig-e fiber cards and realize you just turned your 7206 VXR into a 7202 VXR...
@@livewire98801 That's what the NPE-G1 and NSE-100 are for. 'tho by the gig-e era, they had better hardware. (7401 for starters)
Sick you got the 7200 mostly working. Really makes you appriciate how much cisco made their old equipment built to last.
definitely, thing is a tank
One of the more interesting devices I managed at my first job in IT was a Cisco 7206. Amazingly powerful router back in the day!
I used to work with these a lot when I worked in Cisco’s labs many years ago. Immediately felt old when I saw this was a ‘retro’ channel lol
I love Cisco's constant use of just generic stock images of people on their products, makes you wonder what exactly they were going for with that
Them doing that reminded me of 2000s Nokia phone packaging for unlocked variants (and variants where the phones weren't repackaged into service provider packaging)
yeah I hope you like me joking about it every time I see one, because I'm definitely not going to stop 😆
I wonder what the caption for those images was. "Business man stares into your soul" perhaps.
I had dozens of these from upgrading the BIE to the 8500 series. They are all built like a tank.
That was a fun watch. I got my start in the ISP space and we used these 7206 routers with channelized DS3 cards hooked up to adtran muxes. This allowed us to run a whole mess of T1's out of each 7206. Later we had the fancy NPE's that had fiber interfaces on the NPE to not use up bandwidth points for the other PA cards. I may even have some configs from those days. I had lots of fun with T1 multilinks back then.
Oh dear, this brings me back. Great to see a retro networking video. 😁
We used the 7200s as PE routers for our MPLS customers. Also early on it was used as BRAS and the ADSL DSLAMs would connect over ATM OC-3.
The E1/T1 cards were fractional so they could carry many customer connections. For example one customer would have a 64 kbps leased line and use one time slot, another customer had 256 kbps and used 4 time slots. All terminating on the same card. Later there was even a fractional OC-3 card which could do sub rate down to single DS0s (I remember it was a very expensive card!). There were also pure POSIP cards - Packet Over SONET/SDH which we used back when SONET/SDH was still a thing.
Over all it's was a very versatile platform. The same cards were also usable on the 7500 IIRC.
Hope you'll get your hands on the legendary GSR as well. 😉
I deployed a dozen or so of these in 1998 - thanks for refreshing my memories !
ha you're welcome!
I am working with Cisco devices since the year 2000. Every router model you have shown here look very familiar to me 😀. Looking forward to see other legacy network techniques in future videos.
Love these videos! I can't click fast enough when I see you or The Serial Port upload a video. As a newer Network Admin it's so helpful to see how the roads led us to where we're at now. Keep it up, man!
glad to hear it!
I had a VXR with the NPE-G2 installed in it a while back. Interesting tidbit on the G2: it uses the fastest PowerPC 7448 CPU ever produced. The 7400 series of PowerPC CPUs is most widely known as the "G4" as used in Macintosh computers from the era.
I'd love to try out a G1 or G2 someday. Interesting about it being the fastest 7448!
The ebay prices for G2s are still quite high, wow! @@clabretro
I believe some have procured some NPE-G2s to gut them for their PPC chips to upgrade their vintage Macs!
@@evilZardozyou’d be correct, DOSDUDE1 and HrutkayMods are the ones doing that.
The same box I used to pass my CCIE lab about 22 years ago ... geez times flies
you should try to find a cisco branded rack to hold all of your cisco related networking shenanigans
oh yeah that'd be sweet
Good memories of this equipment.
Sure we did a lot of fixing, upgrading and replacing it.
But you are right, it looked way cooler then the new stuff.
Very cool! This router is before my time when I started my networking career. Funny enough though, for the last year been trying to move a T1 off one of these in our data center…
Love this video Learning CCNA on 2960 Switches and 1941 Routers It's pretty cool to see this stuff fro real instead of just in a packet tracer Lab
OMG its so cool to see one of these, I use these inside of GNS3 for my virtual topologies. Really cool to see it in a video!
ha nice!
I worked on a pair of 7206VXRs at my first actual network engineer ISP job. One trick to getting those bottom cards out is once you get a little movement, take a couple of flat screwdrivers and lever each side of the card simultaneously. You can actually pull the handle clean off if you yank on it when it's in a rack.
This message was transmitted by a 7206VXR that runs my home network. I've got the NPE-G1and actually only run the GE ports on it. Nit-pick: The configuration is in NVRAM, not on the PC cards; they're only for operating system image storage. I've been meaning to replace the 7206 with a 892 for ages, but the VXR is so conveniently reliable!
very cool! those G1 and G2s look impressive.
We actually had one of those 7200VXRs at my last job. It was serving a Comcast Metro E 100/100 connection and splitting it between 3 tenants. It was retired when we upgraded to 300/300 a few years later. I knew nothing about how that device worked or was configured, but it's interesting to see it now.
Man, this brings back memories.
Crazy seeing the thumbnail (which is what brought me in)… Then hearing you mention trying to get a T1 hooked up while showing a 2600 - brings me back to the first dialup ISP our group ever setup… Must watch this for laughs…
Dude your videos are really exciting to watch, hope you make more about older hardware
thanks!
What a cute little router. I know somebody who worked on the Cisco BFR (Big F-ing Router) about 20 years ago and I got to peek in a dev lab once. I didn't know anything about what I was looking at, all I remember is it was the loudest room younger me had ever been in.
I've got a 2821 running in my rack for my home network in a one arm bandit config to route between my vlans. good stuff, I'm loving all your new videos, this is becoming one of my fave channels to keep up with!
very cool! I'm excited to get that thing doing something soon. thank you!
I spent the late 90s and early 2000's building ISP's with these kinds of things. I still have loads of old 2600s and 2800's and piles of 1600's.
nice! cool machines.
I was working at a college around '97 time, and we had fast ethernet for the workstations, most of the servers and several stacked SCSI towers for AXIS token ring CDROM servers.
that high teck even now
I worked with and on these units for a decade or so. There were all kinds of rules around what cards you could use based on the different NPE's that you could install on it. Fun fact, the original Cisco CMTS were based on this style of chassis. So they were essentially just VXR's with broadband Upstream and Downstream cards in it. Pretty fun stuff, and that might tie into the video stuff that you do here on the channel.
cool!
hahahah, when I saw the stuck card I _knew_ it was going to be jammed in there upside down. the networking lab I worked in when I was in high school had several 7200 series routers, and the flash cards getting jammed in upside down was a common occurrence.
haha
I was a Network/Systems Engineer that worked almost exclusively on Cisco equipment. I stopped working in the field about 12 years ago when customers were driving me crazy expecting me to know everything about all things Cisco - routers, switches, firewalls, VoIP, etc.... The 7206 was relatively easy to work on compared to the earlier equipment like the igs, cgs, mgs and the ags... In the early days they were known as "multi-protocol routers" because they could not only run the TCPIP protocol stack, but also others like AppleTalk, XNS, DECNet, etc.... It was an interesting time to work in the growing computer networking / Internet field.....
24 channels for 1.5Mbps awesomeness! great work - now we're Token Ring Dreaming 🤓
Those were awesome pieces of equipment. I've seen them with Ethernet, tokening, serial interfaces, t-1 cards. Ran IP, and IPX/SPX
The v35 card will still work. The blown cap is likely a filter cap and it will run without it!! It might make it unstable on long leads but short leads after the breakout adaptor will probably work or at worst you loose 1 of the 8 channels.. thats why it shows it booted up and green light. If the card was not functional at all the card will prevent power up and not have a green ready light. So replace the cap because it's needed for stability or for 1 channel to function properly but the rest of card is working well enough to boot.
some other folks mentioned that too! I'll have to give it a try
@@clabretro yeah systems like this are all about redundancy and super stable connections so it's probably functional and tested fine because it works in the basic system tests. Like motherboards with dud caps are still still functional but slowly becoming unstable over time as more filter caps fail. Same as tiny caps on CPUs or phone motherboards you knock 1 off and the Device still seems to work with our it lol I used to think why have these parts if they are not needed but as I found out it's usually just for stability of signals or to make sure it can deliver consistent voltage with out getting to low making the CPUs unstable.. so it needs the cap to be perfectly stable but it is likely still working.
This was the last router I worked on as a network engineer. Went into management after that. Don't remember much about it. I spent most of my time with IGS, MGS and AGS+ routers.
The 10mbit card has the AMD LANCE (Local Area Network Controller - Ethernet). Very common chip back in the day. Used by Sun, DEC, Commodore, Sony and others.
I remember managing a Cisco 7200 router at a datacenter in California, in 2004. Good times.
Im also reppin the Connections Museum merch, was in Seattle last week and went for the first time and was in awe the whole time.
awesome!
I have to admit, i was yawning slightly thinking about this one port T1 setup but i made it till the end and you dropped the 8-port bonded setup bomb so fast my head waa spinning. Youve got my attention now! 😀
haha
I like that they made these machines so modular, easier to upgrade and repair
awesome... this and the vxr or what they were called, were hot and too expensive for playing until the very day they were to old to get :(
always liked them and compensated with other devices...
Absolutely great channel. I wish i could have done this back before i lost my collection, so wondeful to see people take apart and appreciate old tech!
these were outrageously expensive when new, especially a tricked out VXR. i'll make sure to cover some cost overviews the next time I get these in a video!
I got to travel all over the country setting up a network I designed. MCI and Norlite frame relay over native T1 and some ISDN PRI with BRI backup links.
One of the companies I worked for was completely wired for token ring. It was interesting to see it all still in place well after it was no longer relevant.
CSU/DSU Serial clock signal is definitely a beginners trap. ❤😂
I work for a large public library system and when I started there 11 years ago the core router was a 7200 with 3 ATM cards and 2 DS3 cards… that thing was fun to replace.
As a teen I always wanted a T1 line…. Now I have a 2 gb Fiber so I think I’m set. 🤣 but definitely following this channel for networking, the cable making segment alone was incredibly useful.
I always love watching your videos... Messing around with old ish enterprise equipment noone has ever seen before and doing impractical stuff is always fun... As a neat bonus, most of your videos are also educational :)
thank you!
Amazing you have these guys, I managed dozens of these units, mostly vxrs.
Man, you just consistently keep pumping out great content every week. Great work my man. Greetings from Sweden!
thank you!
Dude finally! I have been waiting since you showed this a couple weeks ago.
Thanks!
I still using VXR 7206 with NPE-G2 module for BGP in 2024 😂😂😂
it’s still working like a Swiss clock
The first real "IT" job I had was working at a company as a tech support person, we had a token ring network, with a Banyan Vines backbone - connecting all the different rings. We used either IBM PC's or Compac Lugable's as work stations.
as someone who's doing network administration , i'm glad that all cisco work has always been outsorced to guys who actually know it, as we (the rest) don't even want to come close to a cisco router. during an interview for a IT job, after they told me "we use just cisco equipment and config over terminal" i simply thanked and walked away haha
T1 had an almost mythical status far beyond when it was truly the King of the Hill. Even in the days of Cable and VDSL, I remember lusting over a T1 with others.
I think it was a combination of the guaranteed speed (cable being multi access and DSL depending highly on distance to the CO and how oversubscribed the phone company wanted to be) and the rock steady latency that made it so desirable compared to more consumer focused options.
But beyond that, I think it just became almost a legendary nerd achievement to have access to a T1. It was a very weird time. Haha 😂
There were a well spread misunderstanding amoung youngsters that T1 meant 10Mbit/s and T3 meant 100Mbit/s. (T1: 1.544Mbit/s, T3: 44.736Mbit/s, E1: 2.048Mbit/s, E3: 34.368Mbit/s. I'm not very samiliar with the SONET/T-carrier system, but in the european system one E3 or 21 E1 can be muxed into a VC3. A VC4 can carry three VC3. An STM-x (x= 1, 4, 16 or 64) can carry x VC4.)
I ran my isp from 1995 to 2012 in these. I had 2 7206 vxr as I had FE interfaces. I remember doing bgp with 8 T1s y til I went OC3. I don’t remember exactly when I bought my first 7206 but I ran my isp as a business from 1985 until I sold it in 2012.
I was configuring these puppies in year 1999 ... brings back lots of memories... IOS commands...
another fantastic video! I love this ...these machines are fascinating!and I like the different looks and logos ect....the line about being more concerned about the token ring than family is priceless!
ha thanks! glad you liked it!
Speaking of the Serial interface card, we actually use more modern Cisco 4221 ISR routers with NIM-16A cards as terminal servers in some Datacenters. Each NIM-16A card has 2 8 port connectors, and with an "octopus" cable lets us connect to the console port of equipment throughout the Datacenter. Each 4221 can support 2 cards, so we can connect 32 serial devices to each one. The 4221 has anemic bandwidth by modern standards (35Mbps with base licensing) but that's more than enough for this use case. There's also the option of rolling your own serial console server, but the 4221 is a solid platform running IOS-XE that we already have plenty of automation workflows for, AAA for authentication, VPN Tunnels, ACLs for user access to the right devices, etc. etc. Not to mention they sip power in this particular configuration. It's a niche use case, but great for ensuring access to a couple of racks worth of gear out of band. We're definitely not the only large enterprise out there doing it.
I remember my CCNA exam from 2018 and they were still asking questions about token ring and serial connections between routers!
The last two ISPs I used to work still use C7206VXR with NPE-G2 very widely in 2024.
I used to have a pair of those. The nostalgia
Burned tantalum on Serial card is not a big deal. It Just got shorted and it blew. 2 redundant caps next to it Will do its job Just fine.
I had two 7206 VXRs with NPE G2s sitting in my garage up until 3 months ago when I did an e-waste cleanup. They were border routers in our backup DC for years until we upgraded to ASR’s. I liked the platform much better than the new stuff and iOS XE. The end of when Cisco made the best networking equipment.
Those G2s look awesome! Gonna hunt one down eventually along with a G1.
We used a bunch of the toasters across various branches of our telco. At some point, we had an entire room just piled up with 7206s full of E1 interfaces for dialup internet after that had all been torn down.
One of the ones we ran for yeeeeears could only fit a single power supply because someone had used it as a step to reach the cable raceway above the rack and caved in the entire chassis, especially the slot the (at the time empty) second PSU would go in.
haha
So cool to see a fully modular router, I would put the newer big 2800 as your "main basement-net router" and then have the 7206 run your T1 and token-ring stuff...maybe have the VXR as a failover haha
I'm still running a Cisco 3640 router on one of our networks that still used bonded DS1s they are quite robust!
Please! Do more with Token Ring! Back when I was in primary school I inherited a token ring router. It powered up, but it was the only piece of token ring hardware I ever had so I couldn't experiment with it. I would be thrilled to see a functional token ring network. Like you, clabretro, It has stuck with me since.
ha awesome! yeah it'll definitely show up eventually
I was given a 7206 with a couple 8 port 10Base-T cards, a 4 port T1 card, and 2 others that I believe had various serial ports on them. I messed with it for a while and then ended up selling it on eBay in 2007 I believe. Someone bought it for an ISP in Central America. I hope it brought internet to some people who would have otherwise been unable to get it.
man that brings back memories of my ISP days with DSL. we had a 7206 running about 4000 DSL customers for the longest time. i believe we had a 2610 in there too at the headend. the 7206 was DHCP/DSL/Routing for all of the customers. that was about 19 years ago
thats so awesome. PIX routers were literally the thing that saved the internet.
Id be curious if you have come across any Super Micro systems of this vintage. Their semi-more recent stuff is extremely fun. I have one running my homelab rn
I love your stuff, I've been looking for a Dell R720 to act as my new Proxmox server. Man those look sweet in the rack.
Thanks! Love that R720, and that R510 especially. But there are probably better options now, I need a newer NAS and I'll probably do a video on whatever I figure out.
Well best of luck in your search, my NAS is currently an old think station with a Xeon in it that I transplanted into an old rackmount case, the computer components and HDD's are second hand from a computer recycling center I used to work at, case is from a boy's and girls club that was recycling some old stuff. So I've been looking for an upgrade as well. Looking forward to what you find out. And a more in depth video on the R720 and R510 would be super cool, maybe the pros and cons or something like that as well. Thanks man! @@clabretro
Aw man, token ring! I was in college in 2009 and my dorm still had those connectors you showed in the jpeg (token ring to Ethernet). People would call the connectors baluns ("balanced-to-unbalanced"). I never knew the real name, but from the URL are apparently "hermaphroditic connector".
Your comment reminded me of an article I read many years ago where the author mentioned that the secondary school, high school, or college (I can't remember which) they attended used Token Ring networking at the time (which I think was the early '90s).
I remember still being at school and doing "work experience" at a local manufacturing firm in the IT dept. Must have been 1998, they were still using token ring 6mbit/s over Coaxial cable 😁
Wow, what a feeling of nostalgia, I've still got four chassis with two NPE and a smattering of PA. I used to run these things at ISPs I worked at, and rescued the ones I have from a friend when they were swapping out their PPP tunnel endpoints.
I had a plan to make my own lab, but never used them, you want some? I've got 2500 series, 7200s, 3600s and a bunch of fast ethernet switches.
hey, possibly! you can reach out to the email in the channel's about page (might have to be on desktop to see it)
An idea for when you get around to finalizing the setup: Get an ASCII logo and put it into the MOTD along with the obligatory unauthorized access warnings.
Also, I really appreciate these networking videos - they remind me of when I took my CCNA and studied for CCIE back in the 2000s. :)
Oh, and I have a solution to your RUclips name that you've mentioned: Can you "rebrand" as C-Lab Retro?
For a while, I thought that was the channel name. :P
ha some other folks mentioned c-lab. clab is just a nickname I've had forever!
Generally where to find the file to boot from in Cisco devices is part of the configuration, so it not finding the file in slot0: automatically isn't actually unexpected behavior.
This allows you to keep multiple versions of IOS and swap between them easily for troubleshooting, upgrading, etc.
It also allows you to have multiple cards with backup files in case you have a hardware or file corruption error.
I worked in the Cisco support lab in 2012 and these were some of the worst to deal with, squeezing in the back and pulling out the NPE almost always resulted in scraping your hand. Still a good amount of customers around the world were using these in production at the time.