Wonderful Cisco IOS documentation

I wanted to figure out the exact release when Cisco IOS got EBGP load-sharing. Fighting through Feature Navigator is a pain for me, so I usually check older IOS documentation, starting from the old UniverCD URL (I was able to remember that one, the new URLs don't make any sense to me). When I've selected IOS release 11.0 configuration guides, the system redirected me to the "new style" 11.0 Router Products Configuration Guide ... and it looks like IOS did not support IP in release 11.0 :) ... or at least there are no instructions on how to configure it.

It's really sad how Cisco handles documentation these days. First they'd moved everything to new addresses and implemented redirects that didn't work (this is mostly fixed now), now they've managed to lose important parts of documentation.

8 comments:

  1. Unknown 07 July 2008 20:03
    I completely agree - I have yet to see what the documentation DVD looks like now, but I'm assuming it's some sort of local webserver emulating the cisco site. In general, I'm very disappointed in the functionality and performance in Cisco's site. For a networking company - it should perform second to none. Oh, and can someone help cisco understand 'single sign-on' for the cisco.com website
  2. Unknown 07 July 2008 21:19
    have you also noticed that expired CCO account passwords still work? I can sign in with four different passwords for the same CCO account...
  3. Anonymous 07 July 2008 23:30
    It was first supported in IOS 11.2 mainline. Please see the Release Notes here:

    http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/ios/11_2/release/notes/rn112.html#wp33702

    Read the new features for BGP4 Enhancement and in there you will find BGP4 Multipath Support.

    Yes, I agree that the new Web 2.0 web site from Cisco is making harder for most of us to find information. I used to be able to find informaion quickly but not anymore...
  4. Unknown 08 July 2008 02:22
    Ivan

    NIL needs to run a course on:

    How to navigate and successfully extract useful information from the Cisco Website

    I guarantee you, it will be your #1 product! :D
  5. Ivan Pepelnjak 08 July 2008 08:22
    @Scott: When you get the DVD, let me know how it works.

    @Steve: Tried mine, doesn't work for me. Interesting though :)

    @William: Thanks. In the end I decided to use Feature Navigator and found it ... also I should remember to use the Release Notes more often.

    @Whisper: This is what I was doing internally almost 15 years ago. Whenever an engineer would ask a question, I would reply only with the steps needed to find the answer on CCO :))
  6. Jay Swan 08 July 2008 16:20
    I was talking to a Cisco engineer in the Advanced Services group the other day and he commented that a critical part of being a productive engineer at Cisco is to know who to ask for important URLs when the internal search tools fail. :-)
  7. Anonymous 09 July 2008 02:29
    Ivan, in the command reference there is a Command History section for each command which tells you when it was introduced.
  8. Ivan Pepelnjak 09 July 2008 07:23
    Thanks, I'm well aware of the "Command history" section and it's usually of great use for newly-introduced commands. If you want to dig a bit deeper into the IOS history, it becomes useless.

    For example, the maximum-paths entry in 12.4 command reference claims the command was introduced in 12.2T (wrong, it was in 11.2 mainstream) and it does not tell when it was implemented in BGP (also 11.2). The data on when the maximum number of parallel routes has been increased is also incomplete.
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