Cisco 7200 Series Router

Taking a look at a Cisco 7206 from 1996. This is the original 7200 series chassis style before the VXR took over in 1998. We'll try to get this thing talking to another Cisco router over a T1 line!

Rack stuff

Note: The above are Amazon affiliate links. It doesn't cost you extra, but I'll receive a commission which will help keep the content coming. I only link to things I've personally ordered.

Music by Karl Casey @ White Bat Audio

00:00 Intro
00:36 Physical Overview
03:28 Pulling out the Port Adapters
06:50 Pulling the Input/Output Controller
09:00 Pulling the Network Processing Engine
12:30 FastEthernet Port Adapters
13:58 Fixing Some Bent Port Adapters
16:12 Token Ring Port Adapter
18:05 Powering up the 7206
19:45 Troubleshooting the Input/Output Controller
25:19 Successful IOS Boot
26:54 Troubleshooting Port Adapter Hardware Issues
31:13 Calculating Bandwidth Points
33:55 T1 HWIC for the 2821
35:28 Building a T1 Crossover Cable
39:04 Configuring T1 on the 7206
40:37 T1 Attempt on the 2821
42:20 Setting up T1 on a 2610
44:36 T1 Networking!
45:11 Future Plans and Outro

[Nabeelco]

As a teenager, during an argument with my dad, to cut the tension, I cut him off and blurted out "Token Ring's dead, Dad. Get over it!". We both had a good laugh. 😂

[maaadcheddar]

Ever since discovering this channel my network has been overhauled twice. Built an opnsense router, swapped over to proxmox, have a symmetrical gigabit fiber install coming to replace the coax 1000/100 and I'm running new CAT6 drops to every room. Glad I finally got the motivation again because it's been so worth it. I appreciate the inspiration.

Now I need to find a good deal on a rack and then afterwards forget my pin numbers to my cards.

[elremineh]

Looks like we are in for a treat, 46 mins of sweet old networking and routing!

[JF_ARVA]

That FLASH logo on the Cisco card is badass.

[tankgrrl]

"We're just messin' around in the basement" 😄

[InconsistentManner]

I was a student of computer science in 2009... there was several chapters in the networking class about token ring... Half as much as the number of chapters for ethernet networking. The 7 layers of the OSI model, There was a chapter dedicated to serial networking which as you are demonstrating is how these routers communicated with each other... I just found your channel recently, and I am touchingly blasted with nostalgia working as a Certified Networking Technician in the early 2010s.

[robtongeman]

Dude DON'T EVER STOP making these !!! You're networking videos rock. Each one is bringing back so many memories from 20 years ago. Keep up the awesome work. 😊👍🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥

[slazerau]

Up until 2020 I was working for an ISP in Australia where we used 7206 with G2 cards as our core and edge routers.

[svm]

This was like a walk down memory lane. I worked for Cisco for 22 years in several roles, and the 7200 + many others were managed by several different EMS and NMSs that I was the product manager for. Just about every building on Tasman had a lab filled with hundreds of routers, switches, etc... It was a grand time to be working at Cisco.

[jaydubzonward]

retired a pair of these in 2020... really didn't think they'd been around since 1996, i remember them going in new!

[jeffbrl]

This video brought back memories. I joined SprintLink (one of the Tier 1 ISPs at the time) in 1998. Token ring was on its way out but we still had to keep it alive for some low speed edge routers. Most of the routers were 7500 and GSR. I think it wasn't until a few years later that we adopted 7200s for BGP route reflectors. Good times.

[Todd]

I used to work with these a lot when I worked in Cisco’s labs many years ago. Immediately felt old when I saw this was a ‘retro’ channel lol

[olearycrew]

"That's probably more than you ever wanted to know about that" -> could really be the tagline for the whole channel TBH and I'm here for it.

[LBFH]

Oldschool Cisco stuff on a Sunday morning has started to become a new favorite 😁 Never seen these old 7200's before

[dono]

We must be close in age. When I was in grade school I remember friends talking about T1 as being the fastest thing to envy. Though I wasn't interested in networking until about a decade into my career. That 2821 is quite nostalgic. I previously had a used 2811 that I used when studying for the CCNA.
Unfortunately I never had much direct experience with token ring, so I'd love to see it up and running.

[DarrenMossAU]

Great old router and definitely legendary status in the industry. They were rock solid and many of them only stopped working once they were retired. Good video!

[Vnster]

Nice trip down memory lane - I oversaw several of these being put into action over the years and never witnessed any failures. A running joke was that VXR stood for "very expensive router".

[JayJay-]

Oh dear, this brings me back. Great to see a retro networking video. 😁

We used the 7200s as PE routers for our MPLS customers. Also early on it was used as BRAS and the ADSL DSLAMs would connect over ATM OC-3.

The E1/T1 cards were fractional so they could carry many customer connections. For example one customer would have a 64 kbps leased line and use one time slot, another customer had 256 kbps and used 4 time slots. All terminating on the same card. Later there was even a fractional OC-3 card which could do sub rate down to single DS0s (I remember it was a very expensive card!). There were also pure POSIP cards - Packet Over SONET/SDH which we used back when SONET/SDH was still a thing.

Over all it's was a very versatile platform. The same cards were also usable on the 7500 IIRC.

Hope you'll get your hands on the legendary GSR as well. 😉

[wcavendish]

That was a fun watch. I got my start in the ISP space and we used these 7206 routers with channelized DS3 cards hooked up to adtran muxes. This allowed us to run a whole mess of T1's out of each 7206. Later we had the fancy NPE's that had fiber interfaces on the NPE to not use up bandwidth points for the other PA cards. I may even have some configs from those days. I had lots of fun with T1 multilinks back then.

[jblyon]

I was given a 7206 with a couple 8 port 10Base-T cards, a 4 port T1 card, and 2 others that I believe had various serial ports on them. I messed with it for a while and then ended up selling it on eBay in 2007 I believe. Someone bought it for an ISP in Central America. I hope it brought internet to some people who would have otherwise been unable to get it.