Some collegues of mine are having a discussion as to what are reasonable guidelines to decide what version of the IOS to use on the various routers on our network. Currently we have Qtd. 4 3640s and Qtd. 1 4700 on our production network. We recently purchased a 3660 to act as a temporary spare if any of these routers went down. The 4700 is the center of our network and the 3640s serve remote sites. Disclaimer: I did not know of or make any of these decisions nor do I work directly with these people or on this equipment. I am merely dependent on them. The 4700 died and the 3660 was pressed into service with 12.0.5T of the IOS on it. This is what it was shipped with and my coworkers did not get around to checking this out.***12.0.5T is a deferred verison of the IOS and from what I understand it is evil*** The replacement 3660 had problems with its Ethernet and Token Ring interfaces wedging and bringing the entire network down. After a day of screwing around they finally updated to 12.0.7. The 3660 platform does not have a release of code that has met the General Distribution standard as of yet. It does have a version of the code that meets the Limited Distribution standard according to Cisco...12.1.2 and 12.1.1 As of now the 3660 is still in the network at 12.0.7 The 3640s are at 12.0.4T ***A deferred version*** We have gotten a replacement 4700 from Cisco and are going to put it back into the network. It was running 11.2.18 prior to its failure and seemed pretty stable. Not all of the people supporting these routers are extremely confident with the IOS especially in an emergency. If the versions of IOS on these routers had different syntax for any of the configuration commands, this could cause problems in making a quick swap in an emergency. (They will probably not have any premade configurations, but that is another battle.) These routers support services that must be up 24/7. I have these questions. 1. What version of the IOS would you put on each type of router and why? 2. How good a guide are the GD, LD, ED and DF status ratings of the IOS? 3. How important (if at all) do you think it is to have these core routers at the same version of IOS? 4. How important do you think it is to use the latest version of the IOS? 5. When should you make this change? Thanks very much for wading through this long posting. I have never found any published guidelines on this topic other than what is on the Cisco website. I will be sharing the responses with the people who make the decisions regarging this equipment. It would be helpful if respondents gave some indication of their level of experience or certification. Thanks once again for your time and patience, Tony ___________________________________ UPDATED Posting Guidelines: http://www.groupstudy.com/list/guide.html FAQ, list archives, and subscription info: http://www.groupstudy.com Report misconduct and Nondisclosure violations to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
