cisco router spotted in the wild with over 20 years uptime

On this thread on reddit, bhoskins has just posted screen shots of a cisco 2514 featuring 2 10mbit Ethernet ports, and 2 2Mbit Serial ports, and just over 20 years of uptime.

cisco 3000 router with 20 years of uptime

cisco 2514 router with 20 years of uptime

As bhoskins mentions later on in the thread:

I think i probably agree especially considering that’s monthly generator exercises that include transitions from commercial -> battery -> generator power and back.

However…The config… This routers goal in life is to provide management connectivity to some equally ancient SONET equipment that doesn’t even speak IP; it only knows CLNS. That’s right kiddos, it’s a hold over from a time long ago when dinosaurs roamed the earth and there was a competing protocol to IP.

So it runs CLNS and routes it with ISIS between the core and SONET ring. The level-2 database is close to 500 LSP and there are probably on the order of 800 CLNS routes. Oh yeah and it runs IP too so the router itself can be managed. All that with it’s little 608030 CPU and 16MB of memory. That fact that none of those processes have crapped on themselves in 20 years in a router with such limited resources is impressive to say the least.

Pretty amazing stuff.  And of course there was also that Netware server with 16 and a half years of uptime.  It’s amazing on one hand how this older stuff can keep on going, and how dangerous it is security wise to run such dated stuff.

https://virtuallyfun.com/2014/01/27/16-and-a-half-years-of-uptime/

4 thoughts on “cisco router spotted in the wild with over 20 years uptime

  1. “It’s amazing on one hand how this older stuff can keep on going, and how dangerous it is security wise to run such dated stuff.”

    Well, that stuff generally is separated from Internet, running in completely autonomy “outside the XXI century world” ™. So security concerns are pretty limited to how well the thing is physically locked. Even this thing talking IP for management tasks, probably these are, and should be running in a separated management network, completely isolated from Internet.

  2. Hmm.
    “System restarted by reload at Jan 29, 1997”
    “reference time is Jan 27, 2017”
    How can it be “over” 20 yrs?
    Am I missing something?

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