Where was the confusion? Was it perhaps relatively difficult to
configure, difficult to update, or difficult to manage?
Were people maybe confused by the term "BMC"? The terms "iDRAC" and
"iLO" tend to crop up more often in engineering shops.
I see NIST recommended against using it in "FIPS mode", so I assume
there was some security concern?
The references I see still posted on Cisco.com talk about configuring
the BMC in the "System Setup Guide for Cisco 8000 Series Routers."
There's no match in that doc for anything related to BMC, so I assume
the documentation has already been removed.
I'd be very interested in a way to remotely and securely manage a router
out-of-band that didn't involve EIA-232. CLI only would be preferred.
Better still if the BMC firmware and config were unified with the
device's firmware and config: one software package to update, one config
to back up.
-Brian
On 2025-12-23 13:01, Phil Bedard via NANOG wrote:
From a Cisco perspective when we built the first 8000 (Silicon One)
routers, the original 8201/8202 had a separate Baseboard Management
Controller (BMC) the same as a server because we thought people would
truly enjoy having that. In turns out no one used it and more were
confused by it. It added extra cost and took up real estate that could
be used for other things, so it didn’t continue.
Thanks,
Phil
From: Saku Ytti via NANOG <[email protected]>
Date: Tuesday, December 23, 2025 at 12:50 PM
To: North American Network Operators Group <[email protected]>
Cc: Saku Ytti <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: What are folks using for serial consoles these days?
Could we just start asking vendors to implement actual out-of-band
port.
Like Cisco CMP.
The rs232 port we use, is on-band, if the NOS panics or otherwise is
broken or busy, the rs232 port won't work either. On some routers you
used to be able to have hardware break stop executing NOS and execute
shell on rs232, which would allow you to reset the device via rs-232,
even if NOS is not running, but this is actually going away and was
rarely used by operators.
But actual ethernet port on different SOC decoupled from control-plane
would remove need for these RS232 consoles and would get us peak 2005
technology for networking gear. I think we're ready for 2005.
[snip]
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