Cisco young fighter course: the art of owning a console

Introduction: many novice network hardware adjusters fear the console (CLI, Command Line Interface) like fire. Still: you do not have tooltips on the mouse cursor, nor you beautiful pictures, but only obscure letters on a black (green, white) background. It’s scary ...

However, the console is a powerful tool, without mastering which it is impossible to call yourself cisco customizer.

Using the console, you can:
1. Define the initial configuration.
2. Recover lost passwords (for different pieces of iron it’s different. But by searching on cisco.com it is easy to find the process using the keywords “password-recovery (piece of hardware)”
3. Configure non-standard topologies
4. Enable hidden features
5. Verify the correctness settings by show commands
6. Debug the process with debug commands.

Remember: with the console you can do everything, with the GUI - not everything, but only what you programmed and enabled.

How to master the art of quick configuration through the console?

Of course, you need to train a lot :) However, there are several tricks that will facilitate the work and can be useful in real life for quick localization and problem solving or passing the CCIE exam :)

Trick 1: Remember the hot key combinations. The most commonly used ctrl + a (beginning of line), ctrl + e (end of line), ctrl + z (exiting setup mode)

Trick 2: Use the do command on routers and switchesto invoke show commands from configuration mode.
Examples: (config) # do show ip route
(config-if) # do show ip int f0 / 0
This saves a lot of time, because You don’t have to leave setup mode and go back to it. Because console commands are tree-like, then running around the modes really takes time and effort.

Important : There is a subtlety: when using the do command , the tooltip on the question does not work, the tab button and syntax checking for errors. Therefore, if you do not know exactly which show command you want to enter, you still have to exit the configuration mode

Trick 3:Use the selection from the config or the output of other viewing commands. To do this, there are utility commands after the symbol “|” (“Grep”)
Examples: sh run | include ip route
Sh ip route | include 192.168.0.0
Sh run | begin router ospf 1

Trick 4: Use a notepad or other text editor to create a config template, and then pour it with paste-paste into the console. A tsiska carriage translation is recognized as command input. Remember to press the enter button after the last command :)

Trick 5: Use the up and down arrows (or ctrl + p , ctrl + n ) to call up previously entered commands. The size of the command buffer is configurable.

Trick 6:Do not forget that it is possible to enter different commands from different modes: from the unprivileged user mode, you can only see a little, from the privileged user you can see, enable debug , from the configuration mode you can configure parameters or switch to sub-modes. Do not forget that the sign "?" entered without a space will tell you the possible continuation of the command, and a “?" entered with a space will indicate possible further keywords

Trick 7: Teach the teams and actively reduce them! Remember that if the contraction is unambiguous, its tsiska recognizes.
Example (compare):
Ip nat inside source list NAT interface GigabitEthernet0 / 0 overload
Ip nat in so l NAT int G0 / 0 o

To speed up learning, use the tab button: if the beginning of the command is already unambiguous, the tsiska will continue the command automatically.

Trick 8: The lines from the config (running or startup) are commands. You can peek into the config and erase the unwanted team by putting the keyword no

in front of it. In general, as elsewhere: perseverance and work will grind everything! Go ahead

and let it work out :)

SUVZ, Sergey Fedorov, cisco instructor