Not only interesting, but dishonest.

Sometimes, honesty is not the best way to get a job done. This is why society functions best with a 'little white lie'.

Forcing a company to spend money on false premise is tantamount to theft or conversion.

I believe that there is some confusion here. There was no money that changed hands. There was no requirement to upgrade imposed by Cisco. The conflict that Sean cites is wholly internal to the company running the network. If operations insists that a box not be rebooted even though the network is not operational, that sometimes leaves the network engineer in a difficult position: they can't repair the problem and they can't repair the problem. At the same time, the command was installed so that Cisco could actually test crash procedures. [Yes, you do have to test them. Yes, it helps if there is a deterministic and constant way of testing them. ;-) ] Thus, from Cisco's viewpoint, this was simply exposing an existing mechanism. Tony