How to determine the age of a Cisco device

To find out the age of your Cisco switch, AP or Router is not as hard as you might think. Within the Serial Number of the device is all the information you need to know to figure it out.

For this quick document we will use the serial number FOX04230009.


 * 1) To discover the age of your Cisco device you only need to worry about the first 4 numbers in the serial number.
 * 2) So in the case of this serial number we only need to focus on 0423.
 * 3) Now that we have the 4 numbers required to determine age we split them into two sets. 04 and 23.
 * 4) The first half (04) refers to the Year code and the second half (23) refers to the week code.
 * 5) The weeks are run on the 52 week calendar.
 * 6) The year codes are as follows
 * 7) 1997 = 01
 * 8) 1998 = 02
 * 9) 1999 = 03
 * 10) 2000 = 04
 * 11) 2001 = 05
 * 12) 2002 = 06
 * 13) 2003 = 07
 * 14) 2004 = 08
 * 15) 2005 = 09
 * 16) 2006 = 10
 * 17) 2007 = 11
 * 18) 2008 = 12
 * 19) 2009 = 13
 * 20) 2010 = 14
 * 21) 2011 = 15
 * 22) 2012 = 16
 * 23) 2013 = 17
 * 24) 2014 = 18
 * 25) Now that we know what the number codes stand for we can start allocating dates to the numbers.
 * 26) As stated earlier the year code in this serial number is 04. We can see that the 04 code corresponds to the year 2000 in our list above so we now know that our Cisco device was made in the year 2000.
 * 27) We next look at the second set of numbers, 23. Starting at week 1 in January we count up to the 23rd week in the year. We can see that the 23rd week starts in May and crosses over to June half way through in 2000. Because of this we use the earlier of the two as to not underestimate the age.
 * 28) We now have enough information to successfully date the Cisco devices age. The age being May 2000.

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