870 Router

[Corey L]

I've recently spent a few weeks troubleshooting a weird problem I've been having with our 2008R2 servers, I talked to MS and the switch/server vendor Dell about it however the end result (after trying all sorts of things) was that by removing the Cisco router my problem went away.

Problem:  Transfering files between 2008R2 -> 2008R2/2003 servers was incredibly slow, anywhere from <1MB - 8MB depending, however transfering files from 2003 -> 2003 servers was fine.  All these servers are in 10.0.29.0/24, all connected to the same switch (1GB) with the Cisco router as the gateway.

As soon as I unplug the cisco router the problem goes away, once I plug it back in after a short time it comes back again.

The details of my Router are:

C870-ADVSECURITYK9-M, Version 12.4(15)T6 Release (fc2)

I had a look and I don't think I can upgrade the firmware to the latest version due to the amount on memory the device has.

Does anyone have any thoughts as to why this could/would happen?, as far as I'm aware the Cisco router isn't even involved in the transfering of data between to two servers, and the NetMon data I sent the MS Tech didn't show anything happening there either.  I plugged my very old SnapGear Lite2/Request 531R back in and the problem has gone away.

If its simply a faulty device thats fine, but I want to be sure before I replace it with another Cisco router that the problem won't resurface.

Any help would be much appreciated.

[Leo Laohoo]

I had a look and I don't think I can upgrade the firmware to the latest version due to the amount on memory the device has.

What is the DRAM and Flash capacity of the router?

I have several 870 with 128 mb DRAM and 24 mb DRAM and running IOS version 15.1(1)T just fine.

[Corey L]

I'm not 100% certain where I can get that information, but this is what is shown when I do a show version:

Cisco 878W (MPC8272) processor (revision 0x300) with 118784K/12288K bytes of mem
ory.
Processor board ID FHK123124EL
MPC8272 CPU Rev: Part Number 0xC, Mask Number 0x10
4 FastEthernet interfaces
1 ISDN Basic Rate interface
1 ATM interface
1 802.11 Radio
128K bytes of non-volatile configuration memory.
24576K bytes of processor board System flash (Intel Strataflash)

Configuration register is 0x2102

Is the 118784K/12288K the amount of memory I have?  I thought when I looked up the requirements for version 15 that I needed 256MB

Thank you

[Leo Laohoo]

You have 128 mb DRAM and 24 mb Flash.

When this IOS was first released, there's was a type-o (which wasn't corrected for a loooooooong time).  SO I downloaded this version and my routers are still using it (except for some which are using 15.1(1)T1) .  Try downloading them and find out for yourself.

Before you roll this out, strongly recommend you read through the Release Notes so you can determine if you'll be benefiting from any known caveats.

Hope this helps.  Please don't forget to rate our useful posts.  Thanks.

[Corey L]

I'll try upgrading to 15.1(1)T and let you know how it goes, I probably wont get a chance to do this for a day or two though.

Thank you.

[Corey L]

I was unable to update the IOS as I don 't have a valid Technical Support Services Agreement etc, however I did discover the solution.  I contacted the company that originally configured the device and asked what they thought could cause my problem.

Answer was:

The internal interface had ip local-proxy-arp configured on it.

Once I disabled that it started working fine, this has been setup like this for 1-2yrs and worked fine, I don't really understand why it would cause a problem with the 2008R2 servers but it did.