Cisco 7200 VXR Series Router - Old Networking - Paul's Old Crap

today on Paul's old crap we're going to take a look at the Cisco 7200 series chassis router specifically the 7204 VXR model which I own the VXR series offers a backplane improvement over the original 7200 models and allows for faster network processor engines as I believe the non VXR models are limited to about 225,000 packets per second the chassis was available in neither for module or 6 module sizes as indicated by the specific model number 7200 for or 7206 full end-of-life and end of support for all members of the 7200 family appears to have been reached in around 2017 though these routers were around for a very long time before that point I believe the original 7200 models were released in 1996 with the VXR series arriving in around 2002 I first got to see these in action at my job in 2005 as we used a pair of VXR routers for our border the original processing engine model numbers would line up with the packets per second ability of the module so the NP ii ii ii v advertised 225,000 packets per second and the NP e 400 advertised 400,000 packets per second this changes with the NSE - 1 module which advertised 300,000 packets per second though this processor module has a more specific use than the NP e models the upgrade path for the NP e 400 is the mpeg-1 which advertises 1 million packets per second and allows a ram a configuration of up to one gigabyte the last processor engine released for the VXR is the NP e g2 which advertises 2 million packets per second several types of interface modules were released for these 7200 series including multi-channel t1 t3 ISDN token ring synchronous serial including ISDN and others ATM SONET and of course Ethernet configurations generally being 100 megabit or gigabit now let's take a look at my 7204 VXR and some of the modules i've obtained for my lab so what we've got here is the 7204 VXR model I've purchased this on eBay a number of years ago I was basically looking for a router for my Cisco lab preferably one that supported all of these different types of modules so I got this for pretty cheap on eBay because nobody really wants these things they're not the most powerful routers obviously these days so yeah and I'm assuming you can probably find a lot more of these because they are all end-of-life and support so yeah nobody wants to wear them in production so but yeah as you can see this one does have four modules here and then the blank spot down here is where you'd find the i/o module now this router does not have an i/o module and I'll get into that in a little bit but basically the way these modules your work is you snap this to unlock and then you just pull the module out and you can put basically anything you want in here now the types of modules that are available sometimes you will have modules that won't work on the older network processing engines so for example the Gigabit Ethernet card does not work on I believe the NP 300 or below I did have a problem when I was trying to use one of those it required the NP 400 or the higher modules than that so but yeah before we get into the modules we'll take a look at the back of the router now at the rear of the router is where you actually have your network engine so we know we've got down here network processing engine I don't know how well that's going to show up here but this is the NP eg1 and this is I believe the second best available module for this series of router the g2 is powerful than this one but for lab purposes I didn't really think I would need anything like that but in terms of power supplies we do have c-care it's a it's a dual power supply system and they are removable I don't know if these are hot swappable I wouldn't make that assumption so probably don't remove them when the unit's on unless the manual does say so in this lab router I don't have a second power supply installed wasn't a big deal for me so what I've done here is I have removed the NP eg1 from the router and we're going to talk a little bit about the differences between this and the other types of processor engines you might come across not too long ago I did mention that this router does not have anything in the i/o module slot and that's because the NP eg1 actually has what you would have found on the i/o module so for example the compact flash boot media here for your iOS image we do also have the console port and then also an auxilary port now this also does include some Gigabit Ethernet ports which you wouldn't find any of these on the older modules for the network processing engine but that is a feature of the g1 now because the g1 does have these things if you were to leave the i/o module that your router originally would have shipped with inside them inside the slot I don't know exactly what happened I think it might not be properly it was so long ago that I did this upgrade to my own router I'm not too sure if if it actually did cause a problem because the i/o module would have conflicting blue media so I don't know if the router would know exactly what to do about it on the board itself for the mpeg-1 there really isn't a whole lot of user serviceable components we do have our I believe these are the memory slots right in here as the memory in this is adjustable I believe it goes up to one gigabyte of memory and for this one I have sticking I believe I have about 512 megabytes installed and I have no intention of ever changing that I believe that was more than enough for my needs the only other thing in here would be a battery I suppose if the battery on yours is dead you can just swap it out with a new one there probably just a standard battery you can find at any electronic shop or whatever so jumping back around to the front of the unit when I talked about the i/o module that would have been in this slot here this is what the i/o module looks like now in this particular one I did actually already remove the smart media card but that would have just been this here I believe this or no maybe not smart media it's just a standard flash PCMCIA type card this is where it would have stored the boot files for the iOS so because the npg one does have compact flash on the back this entire IO module I'd it's basically not used because as you can also see we do have over here we have a console port next to that we have the auxilary port so these are the same ports that you found on the back of the mpeg-1 and this item module also includes two fast ethernet ports now also on the back of the mpeg-1 we had Gigabit Ethernet so I mean this would just be extra Ethernet ports not really a big deal but having this inserted into the router might actually cause a problem I don't really remember if it works or not I think I originally pulled this module out of my router because of the conflict and it just wouldn't boot off of the compact flash so yeah but what I do also have here this is actually I think it's an older version of the input/output controller so it does have the same slots for the flash card there the Ethernet this is a strange looking port it just says F II and then mi I so Fe for Fast Ethernet I would assume but it's this strange looking port there I'm not too sure what that would be but it does also have the rj45 and this one it's console and auxiliary ports are the real old types of like these old serial type connections so the standard Cisco console cable would not work on this you'd have to get one of those rj45 to whatever this is adapters so I I'm assuming this ayah module probably shipped on some of the very early 7200 series routers so like I'm talking like the mid to late 90s versions so yeah and then I'm it's got a sim here I have no idea what that would be for yeah so yeah and unfortunately I don't have the plate that would have been in here for any of these routers that already had the npg one it didn't use the i/o module so unfortunately I just have this spot open collecting dust on my shelf so going back to when we were talking about the network processing engines what I've got here is the NP 300 and the NP 400 now as you can see there's absolutely no ports whatsoever on these modules so if you were using one of these in your VXR router you would definitely need to have the i/o module down in here otherwise you'd have no console and you'd have no booting now this one it's a very large board and we've also got RAM slots in here this is what my router originally came with on eBay and I can't remember exactly how much memory was on this thing but the NP 300 it does allow for all of the modules that I previously use to work with the exception of the Gigabit Ethernet it just wasn't able to support that kind of bandwidth on the backplane or whatever so yeah it's a fairly old module but the upgrade to that is the NP 400 this is much smaller the board is like less than half the size maybe and this also the processor that this uses is actually the MIPS RM 7000 now the fourth are the NP e 400 and the NP 300 I believe both use the same RM 7,000 processor this one just being faster and I believe this is the RAM module here I'm not too sure what this was maybe like 128 or 256 megabytes yeah but yeah this is basically nothing above the 400 until you jump into the MPEG 1 series so like I said before if you were using either of these modules or any of the modules prior to this so there's also the NP e 225 and I think there was the NP 200 I I'm assuming those ones were also the same deal there'd be no ports on it and you'd have to use the AI module alright let's jump into talking about the modules as you can see here I do have a collection of six modules which exceeds the capacity of my router obviously I can only use four of these at a time the only way around that is if I was to go with the 7206 VXR in which case I could fit all of these modules in there but I don't really need to do that some of these modules are redundant because of the network engine that I'm using so for example when we're talking about the gigabit ethernet module that's what this is so this is basically just one single board one single port if you look at the board itself it looks like this was potentially available with two of these ports because there's just like an empty spot here on the PCB so yeah oh yeah this is uh like a fiber optic type port if you pull this out let's see there we go pull this module out if you want it to go gigabit with copper I believe you can get that type of module for this but at the time I think using fiber was probably more popular so this because the back of my NP eg1 does already have three gigabit ethernet interfaces both copper and if I wanted to have one of these modules in there I could use of the fiber as well so because my MP eg1 does have that there's really no point for me running this in my router so yeah this is one of the modules that I just don't bother using it all ah the other module that while it's interesting I don't actually keep in my chassis this one here it just says H SSI which i think is I'm assuming it means high-speed serial interface now I can be wrong about that but it is some sort of weird type of serial plug that I have no idea outside of this module I don't think I've ever seen this type of plug before so yeah it's a very strange and yeah I don't really have any further information about this I don't believe these are overly popular and you could probably pick them up on eBay for like five dollars because you know who knows what this does so yeah this is another one of the modules that I basically do not keep inside my router so another module here this is redundant in my case but I still keep it in the router this is a fast ethernet module so we've got two rj45 Ethernet ports here and this will give us up to 100 megabit speeds I don't know I figure you can't go wrong with having too many Ethernet ports and also on this if you also got these like empty spots here where I'm assuming this module would have been available with 4 Ethernet ports as well yeah I just keep this in there for access to Ethernet on the front because where I keep this in my lab it's usually a pain to get to you in the rear now we get to some of the interesting stuff what I've got here is a multi-channel t1 now in these days there's probably not a whole lot of uses for t1 modules but I did want to build a very antique network in my house so I have the t1 module and I have even more cisco routers that also have t1 modules in them and I now look them together now when you look at the t1 module it looks like standard Ethernet but it is not what I've also got here is the actual cable this does actually look like an Ethernet cable however the leads inside there they're not the same as an Ethernet cable so on the other end of this cord it is much different and that's why this will not work as an ethernet cord and an ethernet cord will not work as a t1 cable so if you are running an old home network with some t1 modules like I am you have to get the right cables for it this here this one is the enhanced ATM now I think it took me a few tries to get this combination of module correct with some of my other routers this is a ds3 and like it says right in here ds3 and I was looking specifically for this so I can network with yet another one of my old routers and I believe there's actually a few of these ATM type core ATM type modules and yeah I wasn't getting any link on some of my earlier ones I was just basically buying the wrong module but I know absolutely nothing about ATM so you know I just wanted to have some neat networking going on and if we take a look at the cable this uses this is like I guess this is a coaxial type cable I don't really know much about it other than I had to buy it specifically for this module so yeah just basically goes in like that so yeah this is pretty neat and I I've used this to network one of my other older routers the last module we have here this this is a serial module and um I don't really know much about these serial interfaces but I thought this was one it's a pretty interesting because it had all four ports on here and I wanted to find another one of these for one of my older routers and I did so on this fast serial interface what I have is this strange cable that I bought and this basically plugs into one port and then run it to wherever your router is it's a strange interface and I don't I don't know what the length that you're allowed to use is on these cables but I think I've got a six foot cable or so for that and I'm not actually sure what type of speeds you get out of these things I I don't suspect it's a lot but yeah I don't know it's just one of those odd types of networks that you don't see very often and that's pretty much what drew me to this so now that we've got all the modules reinstalled into the chassis I think we'll boot it up and watch the boot sequence all right so I have powered on the router and let's take a look what we've got here the system boot strap I think that's like the internal built-in software so it's non-replaceable like assuming that's right on the actual network engine module anyway we're just waiting for the next stage after a rom onto load which is like I think it's the K boot image which is what it's loading right now before it actually reaches the iOS part and I will note while I was prepping for this video I did actually put the i/o module back into the chassis and I tried turning it on and it actually halted right at this point here and it just sat there I wouldn't go any so yeah if you are running like the npe g1 or g2 more than likely it's not gonna go anywhere with the IO module so yeah but now we're just gonna wait for whatever else is complaining about to finish and now it's loading the actual iOS image off of the compact flash card and so it tells us here we're running the advanced enterprise canine and it's version 15 point to this build isn't quite the latest that was ever released for this platform I think it was 15 point 2 and then for EM 11 maybe was the last version I haven't checked the cisco site in a while but it tells us we've got a bunch of other stuff here we've got our 700 megahertz CPU and in the npe g1 it's a Broadcom CPU not a mips like the earlier network processors and then some other information here we got our two Fast Ethernet 3 gigabit 4 serial 1 ATM interface and then our four channelized t1 interfaces and it tells me that it's 128 megabyte ata compact flash card that's in the in the router there and it's loaded up into the default let's see tomato and so yes I think at some point in the past I erased the routers configuration for a project and forgot about that I didn't realize it was completely wiped until I turn it on just now but so yeah basically all of the interfaces are down because we've essentially got no configuration at all so we enter it take a look at the version there everything we expect to see so we've got like the bootloader here is the 7200 K boot image 15.2 whatever I think that was just whatever the latest was on the cisco site at the time i downloaded it and then the actual iOS that we already looked at there and let's see so the information here cisco 7204 VXR with the mpeg-1 and like we looked at earlier the processor speed tells us of course we have the four slots and just a summary of what the interfaces we had were so if we do just a quick look at the Ordnung configuration let's find some instrument information here so when it comes up with the t1 controllers I it's bait there's no configuration so it's all raw if you're actually doing work on the T ones you might change the I think like a mode between this standard controller mode and how it was using it before but that would be a whole other video to cover all of that I think cuz that's a pretty in-depth and I've forgotten most of the commands but the go down a little further so we've got our standard Gigabit Ethernet not much to see there then we do have our serial interfaces those were those weird-looking plugs there was four of them so at zero one two three and we go down further the fast ethernet yep nothing special there and then the ATM interface which was our ds3 so if we do a I think I was going to look at your face oops ATM and three zero so we look at see bandwidth so that's approximately 45 megabit which sounds about right for a ds3 interface and if we were to look at let's see show interface the serial and I think it was one-zero so those weird serial interfaces the bandwidth on those ones 15:44 kilobits a second so a 1.544 megabit serial interface is what those weird plugs are so about the same that you would expect from a t1 so yeah that's that's interesting I don't think there was much else we were gonna take a look at just basically seeing that the router does in fact boot up and gives you all of these neat interfaces I think at some point in the future what I probably will do is a more in-depth video on the configuration and different scenarios I do have a an old tech blog that I keep running it's available on the web it's the address is triple w dot oMG WTF b BQ CA and on there I do have some Cisco articles where I've actually used this router in order to do some custom labs in my house where I've connected this to other routers over like the t1 and and different options like that so if you're looking for some information on how to do that sort of configuration I do have that up on that website and at some point when I have more time I probably will make videos on doing all that configuration but yeah if you're looking for a neat old Cisco routing equipment the 7200 VXR series are quite convenient for all the different types of interfaces that you can run it's yeah it's neat for old networking and it is a hobby of mine so yeah I I really do like this router and I'm glad I bought it and I can't think of anything else to talk about so I think that will wrap up the video thank you for watching you

Channel: Paul's Crap

Views: 1,907

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: C7200, Cisco Systems, Vintage Networking

Id: vLw6_aZ8QyY

Length: 26min 13sec (1573 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 15 2020