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2821 volatility statement

Tod Larson
Level 3
Level 3

Can anyone provide a volatility statement from Cisco for the 2821 routers and a procedure to erase the contents of any non-volatile memory?  I need this before I can return an RMA'd router to Cisco.

Thank you.

2 Replies 2

gephelps
Cisco Employee
Cisco Employee

I am not aware of any such document.


On the router itself the two areas I can think of are the bootflash and the NVRAM. The bootflash can be formatted and you can used the command erase nvram to clear this memory.

Tod Larson
Level 3
Level 3

Here is what I received from my SE.  This meeets my needs.

2821

There are three non volatile components internal to the 2821: NVRAM, Onboard Flash and a Real Time Clock

NVRAM, Onboard Flash and External Flash (Compact or USB). The above non-volatile components are not modified during normal operations. Only during reconfiguration, system software upgrades and, in some cases, system failures, are the flash components modified. Reconfiguration and software upgrades, by default, require privileged access to the device (This default behavior can be modified). The information stored in the non-volatile memory includes device configuration information, operating system software and crash files. The non-volatile components are not in the data path. At the appropriate privilege level mechanisms exist in the device to copy non-volatile memory files to and from other network enabled devices. These are privileged activities and are multi step processes and therefore would not likely occur accidentally. These mechanisms are properly used to save and update operating system software; to save and restore system configurations; and to copy crash files for offline review. Crash files are only written to flash when the device is specifically configured to do so. These files could potentially contain information from the data path.  The Real Time Clock has a small amount of memory used by the system to store the local time information, this memory is not user accessible.

The following procedures are available for clearing non-volatile on the aforementioned components: For NVRAM, from privileged mode, for IOS execute "write erase" or for CATOS execute "clear config all" and "delete vlan.dat". For Onboard and External Flash, from privileged mode, execute "format [device]:".  No clearing procedures are available for the Real Time Clock.

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