Numerous comments to the "terminal exec prompt" post told me that it might be good to review the line/terminal configuration rules:

• If you want to configure a permanent line characteristic (for example, international), you should do so in the VTY configuration (see also how the VTY configurations are merged);
• If you want a temporary change in the characteristic of your current line (VTY or console), use terminal characteristic to enable it or terminal no characteristic to disable it.

If you use multiprotocol BGP (MP-BGP) in your network to support MPLS VPN, IPv6 or IP Multicast over BGP, it's best if you go all the way and configure an explicit ipv4 address family; the resulting BGP configuration is significantly easier to read and understand as the session-specific parameters are clearly separated from the routing-specific parameters and the IPv4 settings are nicely grouped in an explicit section.

To change the format of the BGP configuration, configure the IPv4 address family with the address-family ipv4 unicast router configuration command (the neighbor statements and other configuration settings pertinent to IPv4 configuration are automatically moved into the new address family) or manually activate a BGP neighbor for IPv4 route exchange with the neighbor activate router configuration command.

Harold Arley Morales has asked an interesting question:

What's the difference between Cisco Express Forwarding and Cisco MLS? Is Cisco's implementation of MLS standardized?

CEF is a routing table lookup mechanism. Instead of doing a lookup in the main IP routing table (displayed with the show ip route), the router does a lookup in a fully computed non-recursive version of the IP routing table (Forwarding Information Base - FIB) with layer-2 next-hop information attached to it (adjacency table).

When testing the ERM functionality that together with an EEM applet generates SNMP traps whenever the CPU load exceeds predefined thresholds, I started to wonder what the snmp-server enable traps cpu threshold command does.

After lenghty conversation with uncle Google and Cisco documentation, I found that there's another way to detect and report high CPU load in Cisco IOS: the CPU threshold notification introduced in IOS release 12.3T.

Gernot Nusshall has asked an interesting question:

How could I configure the EEM to send an SNMP trap when the cpu load (interval=30sec) is higher than 30%?

My first solution was to enable resource policy traps with the snmp-server enable traps resource-policy, but this feature was introduced in 12.4(15)T and I am not sure everyone is willing to run the latest-and-greatest IOS code. Furthermore, it looks like the traps are sent only for resource policies defined through the ERM MIB; I was not able to generate a trap from a manually configured resource policy. Obviously it was time for another EEM applet.

Xavier has mentioned an interesting undocumented command in his comment to the “Continuous display of top CPU processes” post: after you execute terminal exec prompt timestamp, every show command displays current time and CPU utilization before the requested printout.

Sebastian Majewski has found an interesting feature: if you use the network route-map BGP configuration command to originate BGP prefixes and use the match conditions within the route-map, BGP inserts the IP prefix in the BGP table only if the source route in the IP routing table satisfies the route-map conditions.

When you have to monitor which processes consume router’s CPU over a period of time, a Tcl script that emulates the Unix top command might come handy. The following Tcl script continuously displays top 20 Cisco IOS processes and refreshes the update every 5 seconds.

The undesired intermittent bridging behavior of Cisco 871 using old ROMMON software can lead to hard-to-diagnose problems if you're connected to an Internet access network through a cable modem that accepts only a single MAC address. The right sequence of events can leave the router/modem combination in a state with no external connectivity requiring a modem power-cycle:

1. The router and the cable modem are power-cycled.
2. The router starts to bridge between all LAN interfaces, effectively connecting inside workstations directly to the cable modem.
3. One of the workstations could detect a LAN failure (due to router reload) and restart the DHCP process (a Windows XP host would definitely do that).
4. The DHCP requests from the workstation are bridged straight to the cable modem which caches the workstation's MAC address and forwards the DHCP request.
5. The workstation is assigned a public IP address (at this time, the workstation is connected directly to Internet and thus vulnerable).
6. The router loads Cisco IOS and reinitializes the Ethernet interfaces. Bridging between internal and external interfaces is stopped.
7. The router sends DHCP request on the outside interface, but the modem ignores it, as the MAC address of the DHCP request differs from the previously cached one.

In most cases, the cable modem has to be power-cycled to lose the cached MAC address.

Multihoming to a single ISP is a design scenario in which a customer uses multiple Internet connections to the same Internet Service Provider. This design provides resilience against link and device failures, but does not provide protection against major outages within the Service Provider network.

There are three major decisions to be made when designing multihoming to single ISP:

• Will the customer use provider-assigned or provider-independent address space?
• Should the customer use static or dynamic routing with the ISP?
• When using dynamic routing with BGP, does the customer need its own public autonomous system?