According to The Register, Cisco installation CDs for VPN networks contained music.

Specifically, music that sounded exactly like this.

Now, Mexican folk music of the “narcocorridos” variety has a rich tradition and requires extreme skill to produce, and is greatly enjoyed by many music aficionados. But still, if you’re going to come up with a piece of music designed to surprise the hell out of everyone, you could probably choose no better music in the world.

Knowing Cisco, there’s no way that this was deliberate; but this brings to mind two things: First, is there someone out in Baja California with a copy of VPN software in his or her hand, wondering to themselves: “¿Dónde está mi música?”

Second, will this start a trend of “narcorrido-rolling” network engineers?

Cisco is doing everything they can to recover from this error, and in a statement, said:

Cisco is aware that some customers have received defective VPN Client CDs as part of recent orders.

Manufacturing is aware of this problem and is actively reshipping new media to impacted customers.

Defective VPN Client CDs can be identified by the following marking on the back of the media which ends in "MX21511/4"

Of course the moral of the story is that you need to test before you deploy. In this case, it was a little embarrassment, and we all pretty much just have a chuckle about it. But deploying technology on the network without knowing the full effects is just asking for trouble.

I mean, what would have happened if the music actually installed? Is your enterprise prepared to handle accordion configuration?