I need to upgrade bad code Cisco shipped to me with a smile, but instead I’m stuck with the problems.Not that I’m condoning that approach – I’m just pointing at the elephant in the room. All this will serve to accomplish is growth in the warez and gray market for IOS images people need to get their jobs done.
This is a lousy way to enforce licensing agreements. Now that it has though, I’ve got some issues with Cisco’s approach. We have a number of large SmartNet contracts, so this has just never come up for me in the past. I’m going to guess this enforcement has been going on for a while, and this is just the first time I’ve run into it. If the device you’re trying to download software for doesn’t match up with what’s covered in your contracts, your download will fail. It looks like Cisco is matching CCO ID with associated SmartNet contracts. The idea was to bring this router up to something that’s known to be stable and vulnerability free, especially considering it’s Internet-facing. Out of habit, I logged into Cisco’s site, and proceeded to download the latest code for this device. Some stability, security, or other critical issue has rendered the code to be unsuitable for production environments. 
For the uninitiated, when Cisco classifies an IOS release as “deferred”, that means that they don’t want you to run it because it’s known to be problematic. While reviewing one of my remote office environments, I found a small edge router running antiquated, known-buggy code that Cisco has classified as “deferred”.
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