Cisco 45xx Supervisor 6LE Defect

As I tend to work with some Cisco 4506 and similiar switches - equipped with WSX45SUP6LE / WS-X45-SUP6L-E Supervisor Engines, I had the unfortunate delight to seem those rebooting at random.

Cisco did put out an entry in their bug tool ("Sup6LE reloads silently (Reset State: 00000201) / watchdog CISR0: 0x80") with the Bug Tracker ID CSCtf85481 - however, of the multiple accounts I had, I only found it on one of those. Other accounts did refuse my access to this file. As we confronted our Cisco Tech Support prior to finding the bug ourself, there was "no known error" which represented itself in rebooting the switch at random - so they said.

How do you find out it your board is one of those faulty ones?
a) If the serial number is JAE1422xxxx or higher (e.g., JAE1445xxxx, JAE1729xxx, etc) they board should not be affected. If it is in the range provided - check b)
b) If the "Hardware Revision" is 1.3 or higher, it is not affected. [sh idprom supervisor]
c) If either a) or b) are not true. Then the board may be affected by this bug. Contact TAC.

Another sign of the error is the "Last reload reason: Unknown reason" output of show version

It seems like the first batch of Supervisor 6L-E Engines were faulty on a HW level, so only a replacement will help. The engines will start rebooting once a while after a certain amount of time - with the time between each rebooting getting shorter.

[VSS] Upgrading Software on c6509e-VSS / Sup720-10GE

1.) Find an suitable image on cisco.com [i.e. s72033-adventerprisek9_wan-mz.122-33.SXJ1.bin ]
2.) Copy the image to the CF of active Supervisor by TFTP or FTP
copy tftp://IP/images/s72033-adventerprisek9_wan-mz.122-33.SXJ1.bin disk0:
3.) Verfiy the image against the MD5 and internal checksum
verify /md5 disk0:s72033-adventerprisek9_wan-mz.122-33.SXJ1.bin
verify disk0:s72033-adventerprisek9_wan-mz.122-33.SXJ1.bin
4.) Delete old Software on active Supervisor CF
del sw1-slot5-disk0:s72033-ipservicesk9_wan-mz.122-33.SXI5.bin
5.) Unconfigure other Boot Images
conf t
no boot system
config-register 0x2102
boot system flash disk0:
end
copy running-config startup-config
6.) Reload active Supervisor
redundancy reload shelf 1
7.) Wait for the ex-Active to come up again on local Console, sh redundancy should tell you that the ex-Active is now in Cold Standby as there is an Image mismatch. Thats ok, Image does work, so now lets swap the CF cards
8.) Reload now active Supervisor
redundancy reload shelf 2
9.) Wait for the second System to come up again, the VSS should run again in Active / Standby Hot Mode
10.) Copy Bootimage from shelf2 (with CF of shelf1) to shelf1 CF
copy sw-2-slot5-disk0:s72033-adventerprisek9_wan-mz.122-33.SXJ1.bin sw-1-slot5-disk0:
11.) Delete other old images form shelf1 CF
12.) Done

Not the best / Cisco way, but it should hold your Active / Standby Config in right order.