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Pos 355 Cisco Ios

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Router/ Switch Operating System Cisco IOS or Inter-work Operating System is an operating system for the company Cisco’s system routers and network switches. Cisco systems is a multinational corporation based in San Jose of California that designs, manufactures, and sells networking equipment. The company was founded in 1984 by two people working at Stanford University on the computer support staff. The two Stanford University members were Leonard Bosack, who was in charge of the computer science department’s computers and his then girl friend Sandy Lerner who was in charge of the graduate school of business’s computers and they named it after San Francisco which is why in the company’s early years they insisted on the first “c” in …show more content…

These limitations of the OS were not a problem for networking operating systems like Juniper’s JUNOS and others that emerged ten to twenty years after Cisco IOS. Cisco’s response to the problem was to develop a newer version of the IOS dubbed IOS XR which boasted memory protection between processes, pre- emptive scheduling, lightweight threads, and the ability to independently restart failed processes. Cisco IOS XR uses a third party RTOS or real time operating system microkernel called QNX and big part of the current IOS code was re-written to take full advantage of the features offered by the new kernel. One thing about the microkernel is that it removes for the kernel all processes that not one hundred percent required to be ran by the kernel, it then runs them similar to the application processes. Through this method, IOS XR is able to availability needed at a high demand desired for new router platforms. In 2005, Cisco introduced the IOS XR for the Cisco 12000 series platform (Wikipedia, 2013) . The following year Cisco released IOS modularity which extended on the QNX RTOS microkernel into a more traditional IOS environment, but still provides the software upgrade capabilities that customers need and want. Cisco IOS has proven itself vulnerable to buffer overflows and other problems that have caused headaches for the operating system. The IOS needs to know clear text passwords for certain uses so passwords

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