It’s been a while, but configuring their hardware manually in 2016 was bug ridden ridiculousness. Awful UI/UX. Their own techs had specific field notebooks for our make and firmware version that we couldn’t access unless persuaded, detailing various land mines to avoid while working. Literal “don’t click these things in this order” kinds of notes.

A critical security firmware update once brought down redundant pair of firewalls we used because the bug didn’t manifest until a counter buffer overflowed months after application. Three hours into the outage the tech power cycles the thing and our services came back to life.

Cisco is only doing this because some other alternative is more expensive. They had more than a decade to get started.

Cisco iOS even on terminal servers in the early 2000s was...special.