Cisco 7204 VXR Router

Taking a look at a Cisco 7204 VXR router. We'll try out several port adapters, get a T1 connection operating between the 7204 and an older 7206, set up some local networks for a Windows XP machine and a Compaq Proliant DL380 running Windows 2000, and finally try playing some Counter-Strike 1.5.

Rack stuff

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Music by Karl Casey @ White Bat Audio

00:00 Intro
00:58 7200 Series Overview
01:29 7204 VXR Overview
10:48 Port Adapters
15:43 Hooking up and starting the 7204
18:09 New Port Adapters for the 7204
20:52 Future 7204 Hardware Plans
23:10 T1 Connection Setup
27:55 Ethernet Network Setup
29:10 DHCP Server Setup
33:40 Configuring RIPv2
36:10 Making a T1 Cable
41:45 7200 Config Backup over TFTP
45:08 Hot-swapping a Port Adapter
46:47 Installing Half-Life and Counter-Strike 1.5
49:01 Outro

[mtimmsj]

24 year Cisco employee here. I supported the 7200's in the early to mid 2000's as part of the San Jose TAC escalation team. Internally VXR stood for Voice eXchange Router. The source of that was an internal document that I can not share (sorry). You might be asking what Voice eXchange Router meant, well the midplane is more advanced than just being higher bandwidth, it has support for switching DS-0 timeslots across the midplane to each port adapter. The press release for the VXR (can still be found online) and it states, "In addition, the VXR midplane includes a Multiservice Interchange (MIX), which supports switching of DS-0 time slots via MIX interconnects across the midplane to each port adapter slot. The MIX in the Cisco 7200 VXR provides the ability to switch DS-0 time slots between multichannel T1 and E1 interfaces, much like a digital cross connect or an add-drop multiplexer. In the future, this will enable the Cisco 7200 VXR to switch DS-0 voice channels on a T1/E1 interface on one port adapter to and from a separate voice processing port adapter. It will also enable DS-0's to be switched through the Cisco 7200 VXR without any processing, a requirement in certain voice configurations."

[SoundOfWaveform]

These are very good routers. As a network engineer I scream internally seeing them in an enterprise environment. They do still pop up in closets rarely in extremely neglected networks. I love seeing them taken up by collectors though. They are truly a part of networking history.

[mtimmsj]

Ping success rate of 80% for your tftp server occurs because the first ping request goes through arp resolution to know the l2 next hop. Once arp resolves the other 4 requests get responses and are successful resulting in a 4/5 success rate or 80%.

[thebearontheroof]

In 2005 I had an internship at the Cisco TAC facility in RTP working in "Customer Advocacy Lab Operations", which meant we spent all day, every day doing "network recreations": when a Cisco support engineer couldn't solve a customer's problem, they called our group of 19 year-olds to build a scale model of it in our datacenter. We had racks on wheels holding hundreds of line modules, interface cards, router engines, hardware upgrades, power supplies, and on and on and on, every Cisco SKU that was currently supported was either racked up and powered by the dozen, or available to pull from storage. Anyway thanks for triggering a ton of flashbacks; apparently there are still parts of my brain fully dedicated to memorizing Cisco VXR hardware compatibility matrices and old-school Cisco IOS configuration commands.

[chaseohara]

Omg just jumped into RIP instead of using a static routing statement. Legend. 🤣

[fordayinlife]

I have like 50 of these in a storage room, i cannot believe people are so interested in this lmao. Congrats man.

[gordoncreAtive]

"So I got this VXR because I saw it in Clabretro's video" Don't get me started on how much watching your videos costs me. I now own almost a whole server rack of ancient Cisco (and related) stuff because of you.

[nikgolinar]

35:30 you can apply a “logging synchronous” command to fix that, which still spits out the error message but doesnt break up your line of input

[tech]

This was fun and frustrating to watch! Only because I couldn't tell you how to fix some of the problems you ran into! I still work a lot with T1/ISDN based technology with phone systems that use PRIs. You should consider getting an older PBX for your house to learn and play with, I think you'd enjoy it. Feel free to reach out to me if you want recommendations.

[georgemachappy]

As a network engineer who used to have four of these as lab fodder, seeing this series is my Cocomelon. Looking forward to seeing all of these old WAN/LAN technologies. I entered the industry too late to have to configure most of this stuff in production environments.

[dross]

I need a t-shirt with the stick figure guy poking two routers and he says, “do routing” 😅

[Nate-hfhm]

I genuinely said "yes!" in public when i saw this video posted 😆

[keyboard_g]

I remember going to college around then and T1 was the fastest networking I had ever heard of. It was amazing.

[kpanic]

The reason you weren't able to reach your TFTP server via the T1 link is that the TFTP VM has no route back to the lab network. It would send its replies to its default gateway, which probably tries routing it out into the internet since it hasn't a route either.
Quick and dirty fix would be adding manual routes to the TFTP VM.

[Samu]

I love old Cisco stuff, keep it coming!

[Stealth]

Man I always appreciate the heavy, solid construction and engineering for more commercial products. Chunky controls with that heavy detent, metal handles to pull stuff out of racks, RGB that displays useful information instead of doing a light show, etc.

[questionablecommands]

34:42
clabretro: "I'm all about simple to set up down here."
Narrator: Said the man setting up a T1 line on decades old hardware

[NotColaTai]

Man these home lab setups are getting crazy

[OdyseeEnjoyer]

I'm loving this networking content. As a young nerd it's really cool to actually watch legacy equipment videos like this.

Also, I'm seeing you forget to exit configuration terminal before executing commands, thus getting some errors. If you prepend the command with "do" like "Router(config-if)# do show ip int brief" it will work with no need of exiting the terminal. Hope this helps!

[titaniumpotato]

i think that while backing up the running config to a tftp server is technically more correct, doing 'show run', selecting the whole listing, copy pasting into a text document is way easier and faster. That's how we were taught for CCNA and Net+