A couple of weeks ago the company I work for went through and did some lay offs in the network group. You know the market isn't as good as it was back 3 years ago. Well, while thinking about being laid off and how much everyone at the company was mad about the lay offs I started thinking. If I really wanted to hurt this network what would I do? Well I automatically figured that I could go to a random list of routers in our network of 800 plus and issue reload statements that would allow me to reload them 5 or 6 hours after I was gone that day. If I was still there after they did all the head chopping for that day then I would remove the reload by doing a no reload and all would be clear and everyone at the company would think nothing of it. This got me started thinking so over lunch one day I started talking to some of the guys in my group about what I was thinking and turns out my reload statement was nothing. I figured it was the greatest thing ever to have random routers reload a different times around the network. The routers would come back up and business would go back to usual. But then I got into this.

It turns out that Cisco has other pretty good commands that are used for the right purposes and that makes them the routers and switches we have all grown to love. But used in the wrong way, they could take a large network down for months. So here is how it goes.


Authors note: I do not recommend anyone trying this if you are mad at your company or just want to mess around. After my coworkers and I talked about it we all figured your going to do some jail time if you do this.