Daryl Hunter – Hubby, Daddy, Mentor, Friend

Wow, has it really been that long since I've blogged?  **embarassed**

Last night I had a weird issue – I was doing some Cisco Router IOS Upgrades for a client in Texas. This client has 2x Cisco 28xx series routers in BGP/HSRP pairs – so – I could rest assured if I br0k3 something, then failover would happen and things were going to be fine.

I logged on, and started my prepwork and quickly realized that for whatever reason, I did not have access to a TFTP server for my IOS upgrade.  Protip: Plan ahead.

/me #FAIL

Anyway, I was eating my valuable maintenance window time when I got the idea… Why not use Dropbox?  Dropbox is a great cloud-based storage solution – I use it to store "critical" files, and useful files I want to share publicly with friends and family.

So, I uploaded my IOS version to dropbox – in my public folder – and got a publicly accessible http link for it:

Armed with my URL – I set out to upgrade IOS.  I ssh'd into the router and reviewed the "copy" commands like so:

Yup, there it is.  We can copy from http: – this is awesome!  Your mileage may vary here, and I'm positive this is not a Cisco-only solution.  But, for me, I never thought about updating via http before since I've always (15+ years now) used TFTP (or rare cases – xmodem) for this.

Let's try to get the syntax right:

Whoa.  Sweet!  This is gonna work!   Let's finish the filenames:

Hooray!  It's working (thus all the !!!)

Anyway, as if Dropbox didn't already have a million uses – now it has a million + 1.

Has anyone tried this with a non-Cisco device?