Professional Geekism

Update: On my last trip to the hosting facility where this router’s stored, I took the opportunity to test the theory of a non-Cisco CF card knobbling the successful restart of a router. I was sure I’d checked already, but I wanted to be sure.

Thankfully, it restarted without a hitch. So I guess there’s zero cause for alarm.

I know I’ve not written on this log in a long while; I’ve been so busy following the departure of my predecessor, that it’s left me with little time (or will) to write about technology. More to come on this though. I’m still meant to be using this blog as a placement log, so I should really document what I’m doing.

Anyhow, as it happens I’m sat with very little to do at the minute, so I thought I’d write about something that really got me annoyed a week or so ago.

OK, so anyone who’s had the pleasure of setting up a VoIP system based around Cisco CME will know that the flash: directory rapidly fills up with a tonne of files. Config files, language files, firmware files… Basically; a lot of individual little files inhabit your CF card.

Now, on a recent trip to our co-location facility of choice, I wanted to take the opportunity to upgrade the flash card in our voice router. This is a 2811, with the basic 64MB CF card pre-installed, and recently it’s become a pain in the arse working with newer phones (7941’s, in my case) because the firmware files were just taking up too much room. Not to mention you’re only left with ~14MB free space after uploading the IOS image.

So I purchased a 256MB CF card, for about £8 inc. delivery (a mere shadow of the £202-400+ that Cisco wanted for a god-damn CF card of the same size!) and grabbed a standard-affair USB flash drive to use as temporary storage whilst shifting files from one card to the other.

Now, when you’re deleting files en masse from a Cisco flash: directory, it’s possible to use wildcards in order to catch multiple, similarly-named files and delete them all in turn. Which is quite useful if you’re working with 20 config files that all begin with ‘SEPSomethingOrOther’. So because of this included [20th Century] functionality, one would also assume that Cisco would have also included the use of wildcards into the copy command…

Have they bollocks!


RouterX# copy flash:its\SEP* usbflash0:
LOL * IS NOT A VALID FILENAME CHARACTER



RouterX# copy flash:its usbflash0:
LOL CAN'T COPY FOLDERS!


So not only is it retarded enough to not recognise ‘*’ as ‘please copy anything that begins with the preceeding phrase’, it’s also completely inable to copy an entire directory! I cannot believe that Cisco are up to release 12.4(15) and haven’t included some way of copying files en-masse.

It took me bloody ages to copy each of the 62 files from flash: to usbflash0:, swap the CF cards over, and then copy 62 files back to the new CF card. What a horrid waste of time, Cisco.

My good friends at Cisco: if you’re reading this, for the sake of all that’s useful, bloody-well sort it out!