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Cisco UCS servers slugged by 'This SSD will self-destruct in 40,000 hours' firmware farrago

As Firepower kit hit by rare and ridiculous ‘silkscreen ID flaw’

A Friday challenge for netadmins: solve a silkscreen ID bug in a Cisco Firepower appliance.

What? You haven’t heard of that error before? That’s not surprising, because the bug is purely cosmetic. As Cisco explains in a new field notice: “The rear panel of some Cisco Firepower 1120 and 1140 security appliances might be incorrectly labeled as a Firepower 1150 security appliance.”

To detect the bug, Cisco suggests: “Perform a visual inspection of the silkscreen labeling on the rear panel of the FPR1120 or FPR1140 security appliance.”

If you bought a model 1120 or 1140 and the silkscreen ID says “1150”, you are on your way to debugging the problem. Another dead giveaway is that wrongly-labeled kit labels a pair of Ethernet ports as 10G affairs. The 1120 and 1140 are mired at single gigabit speeds.

Cisco’s workaround is: do nothing. The kit works just fine and identifies itself correctly in management software.

A more important Borg warning comes in the form of 23 SKUs in Cisco’s UCS server range have the “this solid state disk will self-destruct in 40,000 hours” bug that’s already plagued HPE servers.

Cisco warned that: “If the SSD reaches the 40,000 power-on hours mark, the drive will be completely unusable and you will have to replace the drive. It is critical that customers upgrade the firmware in order to avoid this issue.”

The fix is new firmware, all available from the link above.

Cisco has not disclosed who made its dodgy drives, but HPE named Western Digital as the source of its not-so-hot hot sand. ®

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