Cisco was one of the first things I thought of when I read the blurb. I'd love to see it go through and be brought up as a challenge against them. I suspect that's one of the reasons you don't see Cisco chasing down folks who bought used gear and didn't ante up for the inspection and SmartNet - it's a legally murky area right now, and the Head Lawyer In Charge over at Cisco didn't really want to be the first to see how it would pan out. Better to keep the companies with that fairly certain revenue than to open the door to those "good enough" couple of year old units.

I haven't had a helpful TAC engineer in something like 5 years, and then only because we'd spent hours with their low-level filter people, correcting the SQL statements they were attempting to run over their remote session. They ended up replacing most of the hardware in the server (which was a nightmare in and of itself... and took far more than 24 hours) only after having us wipe and rebuild it from scratch, and that system still doesn't operate quite right. TAC is the thing that SmartNet is LEAST useful for... my only purpose in having it is to get software updates in a legally compliant fashion. I'll grant you that when I started in networking 10 years ago, I was amazed by TAC. Since then, either I've improved or they have declined.

Another "thanks"; I have been looking for something along these lines on a personal basis. Looking forward to checking it out.