Network Died, Hard, During Company Christmas Party, Leaving Lone Techie To Fix It
The Register, Monday, July 17,2023
Welcome, gentle reader, to another instalment of Who, Me? in which we cushion your entry to the working week with tales of Reg readers having worse days than you. So kick off your shoes and socks, make fists with your toes, and read on.
This week meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Roy" who was contracted to a very large corporation. The company in question was upgrading the core switches on its network from Cisco 4500s to "the shiny new Cisco Nexus 7000 series" - that should give some idea of when this was happening.
As our story begins, the shiny new 7000s were in place and operating in parallel with the existing 4500s. All that remained was to "move all the root bridges for the vlans from the 4500 to the 7000."
How hard can that be? Sounds like a doddle. Roy does mention that there were some 80 of these switches distributed about the building, so maybe a little bit tricky.
Also, the plan was to switch the Nexus switches to use VTP, or VLAN trunking protocol. That should, Roy believed, involve sending a single command to the main switch - again, not a big deal for a resourceful guy like Roy - and the change would ripple out across the network.