Rant:Cisco Application Control Engine Version Numbering

The Cisco ACE soft­ware has a odd way of num­ber­ing ver­sions. If you think Version A2 is the next release of Version 3.0.0. phhfttt.

When the ACE product was first acquired I think that the soft­ware was ver­sion 2.0.0. They quickly pro­duced Version 3.0.0 and then star­ted to num­ber minor releases with the sequence A1.

Thus, we had 3.0.0-A1_1, 3.0.0-A1_2 and so on. For some reason this became known as the A1 release. Because now we have the A2 release. See the mod­ule out­put below:

Software
  loader:    Version 12.2[120]
  system:    Version A2(1.1a) [build 3.0(0)A2(1.1a) adbuild_22:19:41-2008/07/21_/au
to/adbu-rel3/rel_a2_1_1_throttle/REL_3_0_0_A2_1_1A]
  system image file: [LCP] disk0:c6ace-t1k9-mz.A2_1_1a.bin
  installed license: no feature license is installed

This ACE is run­ning A2.1.1a NOT Version 3.0.0 as you might think.

The doc­u­ment­a­tion now refers, vaguely, to the ver­sion on the title page as

Software Version 3.0(0)A1(2)
April 2006 

but the newer version.

Software Version A2(1.0)
March 2008 

Confusing eh. _​grin_​

So, in “Cisco speak” Version 3.0 is NOT NEWER than A2.1, it Version 3.0 nearly always means that A1.x ver­sion and you don’t want any­thing to do with that.

Don’t use Version A1

Frankly, the A1 ver­sion was flaky and had almost no fea­tures. It was also prone to crash­ing, and vari­ous pieces of weird beha­viour. Today, you should pro­ceed imme­di­ately to Version A2.1.2.

boot com­mands

So when you see some­thing like this, quite con­fus­ing, boot syn­tax you will know what is going on.

boot sys­tem image:c6ace-t1k9-mz.A2_1_1a.bin
boot sys­tem image:c6ace-t1k9-mz.3.0.0_A1_6_3a.bin

And yes, it IS per­fectly obvious.

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