There's certain axioms in the industry - one is don't piss your installed base off. I don't have access to the Cisco corporation internal sales secrets but I'll swear on a stack of Bibles that somewere buried in Cisco is a formula that among it's inputs has the number of 7200's containing NPE 100,150,200, etc. still in service.

You can assign all the EOL dates you want, but as long as that sales formula is still pooping out numbers of installed NPE200's that exceed some critical threshold, your developers aren't going to be allowed to write them all off with impunity. And after all the EOL date itself is nothing more than a marketing doohicky intended to frighten children into deinstalling perfectly good running Cisco equipment and replacing it with brand new perfectly good Cisco equipment, thereby keeping the money flowing. If the installed base sits on their fat asses and ignores EOL's as a group, and continues to keep those NPE200's in service, your hands are pretty much tied.

Of course eventually that old gear will go away, even if not as quickly as Cisco's sales group would like, it will eventually go away. I'm just curious as to how far along that you really are. Obviously there were not nearly as many NPE 100's and 150's that went out the door as NPE 200's, thus it was a no brainer to drop support for them. My guess is the NPE200 is a much different story - most used 7xxx series routers I've seen on the secondary market have them, few ever had NPE150's.

Me bad - I should have used the generic terminology "black box" rather than "microcode"

Don't worry about it - if I really wanted to know about the secret internals I could probably find the information in a book on Amazon. :-) If I recall there were a number of Cisco internals books that had new revisions that were a lot more detailed after your last IOS source code leak...

So, I guess you aren't allowed to divulge the info on the 827 cookies either? ;-)

Bad move on using that architecture on something that your going to OEM to the ISP market for retail end users to use as DSL modems. Most ISP's are short on cash and long on techs sitting around with debuggers and liking to take things apart - and a stack of $300 827 routers that have come back from end user customers (who we all know mistreat gear terribly as a matter of routine) that have fried nvram isn't going to be thrown away in the trash by an ISP like a corporation would do. Instead they are going to take it apart and if in the process some of Cisco's secrets get spilled - oh dear!

These are the same people that ported Linux to your stuff, by the way:

http://www.uclinux.org/ports/

I think Cisco made a big mistake abandoning the 6xx DSL CPE gear. The 827 has more bells and whistles but it's easier to break, and the only other DSL CPE manufacturer that even comes close to Nescreen i mean Cisco's 6xx CPEs in terms of reliability is Westell. Everything else on the market is pure garbage.

Ted