[c-nsp] Older gear and IPv6

[Lamar Owen]

On Wednesday 24 March 2010 10:36:54 am Charles Mills wrote:
> Older Layer 3 gear being what it is I'm already aware does everything
> in software if it supports it at all.

Oh, I ran across a quote yesterday while doing some additional research into 
the IPv6 capabilities and caveats with hardware I have, and turned up an 
interesting quote related to Gert's favorite hardware switching platform (said 
fully tongue in check, Gert, because I know how you feel about the beasts I'm 
talking about).  From Cisco, 11 years ago:

"The Catalyst 8500 is future-proof and serves as a platform
that provides network managers with investment protection
for their Catalyst series switches. The line modules each
contain ASIC technology that enables the wire-speed
Layer 3 switching, and these ASICs are field upgradable
with a simple microcode update. This feature allows
the Catalyst 8500 to be used today in networks that are
primarily IPv4 and Novell IPX, but also in the future as IPv6
becomes more prevalent."

Source: Catalyst 8540 data sheet, circa 1999.  You can find it yourself if you 
dig hard enough.

Anybody ever seen a layer 3 IOS on 8540CSR do IPv6?

Yes, I actually do still have a couple in light production that are working 
very well in their niche, which is just simple raw IPv4 forwarding with no 
features, that is, at the network core, and at layer 3.  We've not run into 
the problems I've read about, and, even though they are way past EOL, EOCM, 
etc, they're still zipping along, and serving nicely in my gigabit core.... 
one day I'll upgrade to ten-gig, probably about the time that ten-gig core 
switches go EOS....