What can I do with a Cisco Catalyst 5500??

P

plasma

Gawd
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Apr 6, 2004
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I was given a Cisco Catalyst 5500 for free and was wondering what I could do with it? It's a pretty big and heavy piece of gear. It has 13 card slots, with 4-5 of them full with like 96 ports:eek:way more than I'll ever need for myself. I was hoping to get some ideas as far as what I could do with it?

What is it worth? From a quick search it looks like they go for about $100-250:confused:I also think it would be fairly expensive to ship which probably means I'd have to find a local buyer to do that.

Could it be useful for hosting LAN parties? I was thinking I could donate it to a pc gaming group or something

Would it be any good to learn some Cisco stuff with? like study for certs etc?


Since I haven't taken any pics of it yet this is the biggest best one I could find online to give you an idea of what it looks like

5500u.jpg
 
Hold a door open... i see them on ceized police auctions all the time
 
Ok, so here's the deal with Cisco chassis in general. Hopefully, this will enlighten some of you who were wondering about them.

Your capabilities with the chassis mostly depend on what supervisor is in it. Essentially, the "sup" is the brains of the chassis. I'm going to generalize here, but it basically makes all of the switching and routing decisions... the line cards are very stupid. Depending on which sup you get and which modules are installed on it, it will dictate what the switch is capable of doing. The chassis itself is nothing more but just a bunch of pins and housing.

The 5500 is pretty old.. it was already replaced by the 6000, which was then replaced by the 6500. Hell, even the 6500 is showing age, but it was revamped a bit with an SFM then again with the sup720 that makes the switching fabric 720Gbps. This means that the line cards will share a faster forwarding path than the slow 6500 bus. Nonetheless, the 6500 remains the enterprise switch of choice until the cisco nexus 7000 matures.. and that should be a while.

So, what can you do with it? Well, if you have a supIIIG with an RSFC (route switch feature card) you can run routing protocols like RIP, EIGRP, OSPF, BGP. An RSM module on it might work too. If you ever get more equipment, then you can setup neighbors and really start to understand what this crazy Cisco shit is all about. Believe me, you can learn an incredible amount that most people in tech today take for granted.

The issue with the 5500 is that it can't run IOS natively, whereas the 6K can. This will no doubt be confusing to you. There is a switching processor that will run CatOS and a routing processor (RSFC) that will run IOS. CatOS is very weird and obsolete... and I regret using it. You would literally have to switch back and forth between CatOS and IOS (ctrl CCC) when you want to switch between L2 and L3. Thankfully, I rarely deal with it and can at least get by when I do.

If you don't have an IIIG w/RSFC... then your capabilities are pretty limited. You'll just have CatOS which can't route. You can play around with it for a bit.. but CatOS is starting to fade away in the industry and IOS is drastically different. Still, the 5500 would be great for LAN parties haha.. you can just setup a giant VLAN if you want and configure everyone's PC for one large subnet.
 
just2cool said:
Ok, so here's the deal with Cisco chassis in general. Hopefully, this will enlighten some of you who were wondering about them.

Your capabilities with the chassis mostly depend on what supervisor is in it. Essentially, the "sup" is the brains of the chassis. I'm going to generalize here, but it basically makes all of the switching and routing decisions... the line cards are very stupid. Depending on which sup you get and which modules are installed on it, it will dictate what the switch is capable of doing. The chassis itself is nothing more but just a bunch of pins and housing.

The 5500 is pretty old.. it was already replaced by the 6000, which was then replaced by the 6500. Hell, even the 6500 is showing age, but it was revamped a bit with an SFM then again with the sup720 that makes the switching fabric 720Gbps. This means that the line cards will share a faster forwarding path than the slow 6500 bus. Nonetheless, the 6500 remains the enterprise switch of choice until the cisco nexus 7000 matures.. and that should be a while.

So, what can you do with it? Well, if you have a supIIIG with an RSFC (route switch feature card) you can run routing protocols like RIP, EIGRP, OSPF, BGP. An RSM module on it might work too. If you ever get more equipment, then you can setup neighbors and really start to understand what this crazy Cisco shit is all about. Believe me, you can learn an incredible amount that most people in tech today take for granted.

The issue with the 5500 is that it can't run IOS natively, whereas the 6K can. This will no doubt be confusing to you. There is a switching processor that will run CatOS and a routing processor (RSFC) that will run IOS. CatOS is very weird and obsolete... and I regret using it. You would literally have to switch back and forth between CatOS and IOS (ctrl CCC) when you want to switch between L2 and L3. Thankfully, I rarely deal with it and can at least get by when I do.

If you don't have an IIIG w/RSFC... then your capabilities are pretty limited. You'll just have CatOS which can't route. You can play around with it for a bit.. but CatOS is starting to fade away in the industry and IOS is drastically different. Still, the 5500 would be great for LAN parties haha.. you can just setup a giant VLAN if you want and configure everyone's PC for one large subnet.
Click to expand...

Fantastic info! Really awesome of you to take the time to post all that.
 
Thank for all the info, just what I was looking for. I know it's pretty old, and for all I know might not even power up or work which will be my first order of business. I might try to get it going and see what I can do with it, and then depending maybe list it for sale somewhere for like $100 or donate to somebody that could use it for LAN parties etc
 
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