…the same people that decided on the ASR920 MPLS L2VPN contructs… geez, I recall those being strange Aaron
On Aug 6, 2025, at 2:50 PM, Dan Mahoney (Gushi) via NANOG <nanog@lists.nanog.org> wrote:
Note: This is an attempt at Humor that I hope to make my fellow graybeards go "wait, really?". It gave me a fun story to tell. But it may just read as old-man-yells-at-cloud-hardware-vendor.
While we're posting fun problems about SNMP polling, where the "S" stands for "Simple" (?), and we're trying to walk 10's of megs of data out of a system, but the protocol only ever uses UDP, even though TCP is totally in the spec...
Can someone please tell me which engineer at Cisco decided that the serial ports on some of their ASR920 would be:
* not in an RJ45 shell (as we've seen since the C2501 days)...
* nor a USB-micro that presents PL2032 serial port controller internally, that connects with a micro-to-usb-A (like everyone has lying around to charge their old stuff?), and like every other cisco device has had for 10 years.
But instead, would be your choice of:
* A usb "A" port, that presents a virtual serial port to the host PC, but which then requires a USB-A-TO-USB-A cable that nobody has, and is next to, and identical to, (but distinct from) the USB port where one can plug in flash drives...
OR
* A totally different port on the other side of the main ports that has the usual TXD, RXD, GND, CTS, RTS -- but ALSO inside a USB-A header, so you need some special kind of unobtanium breakout box (And another of those for the AUX connector.)
===
WHAT?
If you don't believe me, go look up pictures of the Cisco ASR-920-24TZ-M
I've had to walk people on the datacenter floor through splicing a serial console together with twisted wires, (stripped with the teeth as the lord intended), because of this, over a bad facetime connection -- because of course that's where the cellular and wifi signal's worst, inside the building with thousands of 10G connections to the internet.
By cutting these corners, Cisco saved space for the RJ45 sitting right there for an "ALARM" connector, I'm sure that's a crucial thing that everyone who needs a small router like this will use. (My ASR9000's had it, my ASR1001X's didn't, but a 920...sure?)
Clearly Cisco hired someone from the iPhone headphone port division (let's be "brave" and delete it!). Or the APC UPS DE-9 port division, where connecting a straight-through cable would cause it to drop the load.
This is as bad as the ham radio a friend sent me, that has a USB charger that puts out 12V. (That one got some hot glue to make it a perma-cable, it's an otherwise fine radio).
i've known some awesome people who worked at Cisco (including one of dayjob's board members, who just passed away. We miss you, Fred!). Jim Houts in the TME lab and Xander Thujis have been incredibly kind and helpful to us, in a bygone era.
But this here, this is some temu-level stuff.
I'll be here all week, try the veal.
-Dan/W3ZUL
--
--------Dan Mahoney-------- Techie, Sysadmin, WebGeek Gushi on efnet/undernet IRC FB: fb.com/DanielMahoneyIV LI: linkedin.com/in/gushi Site: http://www.gushi.org ---------------------------
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