So my boss has this tendency to save a few bucks by buying gear from just whoever. Not every time, but a lot of the time. I really never gave it much thought, assumed he was doing things legitimately and just did my thing.
Then it was decided that I should do OS updates on all our routers and switches. I went through, site by site, upgrading things and everything was going just fine. Then I had a switch stack that didn't come back up after reboot. After digging into it and doing some troubleshooting, the issue was a license problem. The switches decided that they weren't properly licensed and stopped passing traffic.
Long story short, it turns out he had bought the gear from some unknown company. The switches were on some sort of blacklist and that's why they were bricked. Since I didn't know this, I had reached out to Cisco for support and now they know my company had these switches.
So I'm wondering...aside from us having to scramble to get replacement switches installed, will there be any further consequences of this? Either for my boss, me personally, or the company? Will the Cisco Police come knocking on the door looking for proof-of-purchase for every Cisco device we have? Is there likely to be any legal fallout?
I've been in this business for about 23 years now and have literally never run into anything of this sort and I've worked with some shady characters. I just have no words.
