I’ll go ahead and note that to actually get a search result that has to do with ’session 15′ in the Cisco sense, “session 15 cisco” returns exactly what you’d expect (per google.com). If things haven’t changed, that search should give you a top result related to the Cisco 6500 series MSFC. The ’session 15′ (or 16) comes into play when you’ve got such a card in your Catalyst 6000 and you want access to it from the switch’s brain, the supervisor engine (SE).
I’m not normally fixated on ’session 15′ or sessions numbered 15, but as long as I’ve gone this far, I might as well give a little more explanation for why I care what google says about it, and why I chose it for the blog title. The story, in which the completely unexpected, eldritch power of ’session 15′ was revealed to me, is from early in my networking life.
It was early afternoon at Brabanx Inc. , and we had recently received a new 6506 switch. Working with another admin, I had unboxed and powered on the switch in the lab. The two power supplies came up, the switch booted, and the fans shot air through the idle system, as frantic as if the switch was pushing out of hurricane of packets. The fans, though, were all right. I was goofily excited myself, eager to get the switch online and working. I’d never started an installation from scratch with one of these 6500s, and I planned to get it squared away in an hour or two, report to the upperlings, and pat myself on the back the rest of the day. The only problem was, we couldn’t find a way to console into the router card. Vlans were great and nifty, shiny new switchports were wonderful, but we also needed the 6500 to do some serious routing, and without getting into the router card, we weren’t getting anywhere.