Known issues or dangers in purchasing L3 switches that are used

[DrB0b]

Hello all,
Just wanting to cover all bases as I cannot seem to find anything helpful on ye ole interwebs. We purchased a few low end business class SG300-52 switches off of ebay. I factory reset them, upgraded the boot loader, and upgraded the firmware. Is there anything else I am missing that someone could have added some sort of backdoor software-wise? Pretty sure the bootloader and firmware are the only items that get loaded and since they are both now from Cisco I feel confident.
If anyone knows of any other issues, other than the possible not supported by Cisco side, I would love to know. Thank you all.

Learning - A never ending quest for knowledge usually attained by being thrown in a situation and told to fix it NOW.

EDIT: fix title as I added the word USED a couple of times in the title......

 

[iggsterman]

I do not see issues buying used switches from a reputable source. I would not buy a security device off of Ebay however.
Another consideration is there are many counterfeit devices on the market and if you ever have a device like that and have to ask Cisco for help that that would spell a lot of unpleasant experience.

 

[DrB0b]

Hi iggsterman,
I was a little worried about the counterfeit issue but two things give me some assurance:
1) They appear extremely real down to the smallest detail. Plus these are not really high in demand units anymore so I wouldn't think it would be worth counterfeiting.
2) They are going on our camera system to basically act as fiber port trunks. So not much in line of real setup so not much to troubleshoot. Not worried about opening ticket with Cisco for these switches.

I do agree that a firewall or external facing router I would be very hesitant to buy used from anywhere.

Thanks for looking over my initial post!

Learning - A never ending quest for knowledge usually attained by being thrown in a situation and told to fix it NOW.

 

[CASSBusinessSystems]

We would recommend formatting the flash of any used switches (i.e., Cisco Catalyst 3750, 2960, etc) and uploading an image via xmodem. Who knows what garbage was put on there by a previous owner that could get in your way later on down the road. From a software standpoint, you would then be starting fresh out of the box.