Cisco IOS Release 15.0

Cisco is playing with numbers again and this time its IOS is the victim ;-). Jumping from 12.4 to 15 lets you know that Cisco is 'afraid' of the numbers 13 and 14 (number 13 is considered unlucky in the Western culture and number 14 (because of the 4) in Asian culture). This is taken from Ivan Pepelnjak's site (http://blog.ioshints.info/2009/10/ios-release-150.html). For more information you can also visit Michael Morris's blog post at NetworkWorld (http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/45883).

IOS release 15.0

This is not an April 1^st post: I’ve just realized that Cisco quietly released IOS 15.0M (mainstream). Haven’t tested it yet, but the images for a large variety of platforms are already available on CCO. The new features listed in the documentation include:

• Full BFD support, including static routes, BFD-in-VRF and BFD-over-Frame Relay (next step: test it on a 2800-series router);
• DHCP authentication;
• DMVPN tunnel health monitoring;
• EEM 3.1 (whatever that is, the EEM documentation hasn’t been updated yet);
• Interaction between IS-IS and LDP;
• BGP local convergence in MPLS VPN networks (the feature has already been available 12.2 SRC, now it’s available on more platforms);
• OSPF graceful shutdown and OSPF TTL security check features are available on more platforms;
• Intra-zone traffic inspection in zone-based firewall.

It looks like (as expected) the 15.0 release is a grand merge of all previous IOS trains (with a few extra features). Good job; finally we have something new to play with :)