On Sat, 05 Feb 2000, Ethan Dicks wrote: You know...strangely enough, that line of router hardware has pretty much been "artificially" obsoleted by cisco. I mean, not that such practices are all that unusual (the ss5/170 was discontinued how many months after it had been put into production? like four?) but despite their archaic physical appearance, the AGS+ is only now getting a bit "old" by today's [non-PC] standards. It's the immediate predecessor of the 7000, and is a good deal faster than the 7000 as well, assuming it's a later CSC4-equipped box..which is why cisco wants all the AGSs to go away so badly. There are still a good number of AGS+ routers in racks at peering points all over the world terminating big pipes, and that won't be changing anytime soon. Why? They work, and they seldom fail. The attitudes there are affected a little more by the telco industry and a little less by the PC industry. But in spite of that, I'm sure you'll get your hands on one from someone a little *more* affected (INfected?) by the PC industry, and win bigtime. I sure did! :-) There's a fellow I know in Sweden who does 64mb mods and clock speedup hacks on CSC4 boards regularly for those who don't feel like paying cisco's blood money for $60,000 monsters like the 75xx...'cause just about the only thing the AGS+ can't terminate is an OCn circuit. The last release of IOS that'll run on it is 11.1, more than modern enough for all but the most whiz-bang of routing "features". No krb5 in 11.1 though, bummer. So anyway, to my point...You should be able to get your hands on an AGS+ for a few hundred bucks anytime, if you don't want to wait for one to come down the pike. People rarely "throw them out" because cisco is (or at least was, it's been a year or so since I talked to anyone about it) vacuuming them up extremely thoroughly to keep people from (gasp!) using them. A friend of mine squeaked a handful of brand-new CSC4 boards out of cisco a while back...said they're kept under lock and key! I can just picture the cisco salesdroid..."hey, I'll give you 42% if you tell all your friends that you threw this in the trash...deal?" Anyway, sorry for being so long-winded this morning. I just woke up. Happy AGS hacking; they're really cool boxes! If you need images or stuff like that let me know. Oh yeah, and stay away from any processor board that's pre-CSC4. -Dave McGuire