Eight Cisco NCS 6000 line cards need firmware upgrades, after Switchzilla learned they could be bricked by an IOS XR upgrade.

The operating system upgrade in question is IOS XR 5.2.x.

What Cisco found is that a number of line cards in the NC6 range with “updated 500 MHz ternary content-addressable memory (TCAM)” could either fail to boot, or move into the “IN-RESET” state unless they have a System Management Unit upgrade as well.

The symptom is pretty unmistakeable: if you install a new line card in a system running IOS XR 5.2.x, you'll get a Network Processor Unit (NPU)

Exclusive The UK Home Office is contemplating "a complete or a partial shutdown" of its ambitious programme to shift blue light services off radio and on to 4G, The Register can reveal.

The Emergency Services Mobile Communication Programme (ESMCP) was supposed to replace the Motorola-owned Airwave radio service with a £1.2bn 4G Emergency Services Network (ESN) run by EE. It also intended to kit out emergency services with 4G-enabled devices ahead of Airwave being switched off by 31 December 2019.

However, the Home Office is in the process of

A newly released draft of the United Nations' masterplan to transition the internet to IPv6 has met a furious and despairing response from internet engineers.

"Utterly, utterly, broken. It has no redeeming or worthwhile qualities at all," commented one engineer to an dedicated IPv6 working group at Europe's regional internet registry, RIPE.

Others called the draft "fundamentally flawed," "ill-conceived," "awful," and "pointless to the degree of being self-destructive."

With one day left before RIPE is due to provide formal comments, there is not a single positive sentence, and the general consensus appears to be that the entire document should be

Some of the best hacks are the ones which seem perfectly obvious in hindsight; a solution to the problem that’s so elegant, you wonder how it never occurred to you before. Of course we also love the hacks that are so complex your eyes start to water, but it’s nice to have a balance. This one, sent in by [Eduardo Zola] is definitely in the former group.

In the video after the break, [Eduardo] demonstrates his extremely simple setup for using ultrasonic transducers for one-way data communication. Powered by a pair of Arduinos and using transducers salvaged from the extremely …read more

The ESP8266 has become practically the 555 chip of WiFi connected microcontrollers. Traditionally, you’d buy one on a little breakout board with some pins and a few connectors, and then wire up anything else you need. The ESP8266’s big brother, the ESP32, hasn’t quite taken over from the ESP8266, but it has a lot more power and many more options. [Andreas] has a new video that shows seven new ESP32 boards that have integral displays. These boards can simplify a lot of applications where you need both WiFi and a user interface.

Of the boards examined, six of them have …read more