Category: configuration

Someone has sent me an interesting question a while ago: he's changed the configuration of a single VTY line and got three blocks of VTY configuration commands, similar to this:

line vty 0 2
 login
line vty 3
 password secret
 login
line vty 4
 login

He wanted to merge the three configuration blocks back into a single one but somehow didn't know how to do it.

To realize what's going on, you have to understand how the IOS generates line configurations. It takes the first line (VTY 0, for example) and generates its configuration. If the next line (VTY 1) has exactly the same configuration, the range of numbers is expanded (becoming VTY 0 1) and so forth until the pool of similar lines is exhausted or a line is found that has at least one parameter different from the starting one, in which case a new block is started. That's why the sample configuration has three blocks (0-2, 3 and 4) even though the first and the third block are identical.

However, if you change the offending parameter, the VTY lines will have identical configurations and will be automatically merged. If you want to be on the safe side, you should change the parameter for all lines, for example:

line vty 0 4
 login
 password secret

Note: This article is part of You've asked for it series.

One of the most tedious tasks in the initial lab setup (at least for me) is the IP address configuration, which usually includes a number of typos and mixups on the WAN links. You can simplify then WAN address configuration if you configure only one end of the WAN link and let PPP do the rest. For example, you could use the following configuration to configure WAN link on your core router …

hostname Core-2
!
interface Serial1/0
 description link to POP
 ip address 10.0.2.1 255.255.255.252
 encapsulation ppp
 peer default ip address 10.0.2.2

… and use IPCP negotiation on the POP router to pick up the WAN IP address:

hostname POP
!
interface Serial1/0
 description link to Core-1
 ip address negotiated
 encapsulation ppp

You should not configure no peer neighbor-route on the router that gets dynamic IP address, as the subnet mask is not assigned with IPCP; you need the IPCP-generated host routes if you want to do hop-by-hop telnet between the routers.

Every now and then, EEM applets fail to recognize a new configuration prompt generated by the router and abort due to timeout (or hang-up forever if you're using IOS release prior to 12.4(15)T). You can use the new pattern keyword of the action cli configuration command to fix the bug.

Were you ever in a situation where a file that would have to be on the router was sitting on your laptop, but you couldn't store it into the router's flash across the Telnet session or through the console port?

If the file in question is a text file, and the router supports Tcl shell, danshtr documented an interesting trick: you create the file in Tclsh interpreter, cut-and-paste the text through the telnet session into a Tcl string and write the string to the file. If you want to have a more cryptic solution here it is:

• Start tclsh;
• Enter puts [open "flash:filename" w+] {. Do not hit the ENTER key at the end of the line
• Copy-paste the file contents. The contents should not include unmatched curly right brackets (every curly right bracket has to be preceded by a matching curly left bracket).
• After the file contents have been pasted, enter } and press ENTER.
• End the tclsh session with tclquit.

When two groups within Cisco needed time-based command execution in Cisco IOS, they (in a typical big-corporation fashion) decided to implement the same wheel from two different sets of spokes and rims. One group built the Embedded Event Manager with its event timer cron command (introduced in 12.2(25)S and 12.3(14)T), the other group created the more limited kron command set (introduced in 12.3(1)).

I've stumbled across a blog post that indicates there's still confusion on some fundamental configuration issues. I will not even try to guess whether there is a wide consensus on how to configure a router, but these are the facts (and here is a ten year old position from Cisco):

• Type-7 encryption used in enable password has been broken. Source code for the decrypt program and cracker programs are available online, or you could use a router to do it for you.
• The type-7 encryption is reversible (and easily breakable due to a weak algorithm), whereas type-5 encryption is a one-way encryption that probably requires a dictionary attack to break.
• Based on the previous two facts, you should never use enable password. Use enable secret.
• The service password-encryption encodes passwords attached to local usernames with type-7 encryption. The usage of type-7 encryption is necessary as you might need the cleartext passwords in some authentication mechanisms (for example, CHAP). However, it's still better to have scrambled passwords than cleartext ones; at least a casual observer will not be able to read them. Conclusion: use service password-encryption.
• If your authentication methods don't need cleartext passwords (examples: local username/password authentication, local AAA authentication or PAP authentication), use username secret configuration command (available from IOS releases 12.2T, 12.3 and 12.0S).

I should probably write this one on April 1st, but maybe October 31st is not such a bad choice after all … if you configure no service prompt config, the configuration prompt is gone; when you enter the configuration mode with the configure terminal command, you get an empty line (like you did with Cisco software release 9.1 some 15 years ago). Similarly, you can disable command-line editing with the no editing line configuration command or terminal no editing exec-level command. If only there would be a way to disable the context-sensitive help :)

I always thought that the new format of the Cisco web-based documentation was awful, as it consumes way more bandwidth than the old version and is slower to load over low-speed links as it displays the text only after the complete page is loaded due to heavy use of table-based HTML layout (I will refrain from commenting the use of this layout technique in the third millenium). However, the new content structure has some significant benefits; for example, all the 12.4T feature guides are collected on a single page … fantastic if you try to find a feature that you remember was implemented somewhere in 12.4T track.

In his comment to my post about re-enabling debugging after router reload, Mike pointed out an interesting IOS feature: you can execute the do command from a configuration file, not just from the user interface. To make his tip even more useful, you can store the do command(s) in an external file on a TFTP server, not in the startup configuration (which would have to be edited manually). With the boot host URL configuration command you'd then ensure that these commands are executed after the router reload.

Notes:

• The router expects a newline character at the end of the configuration file. The best way to ensure it's always there is to add a comment line at the end of the file
• The configuration file load usually fails immediately after the reboot, as the interfaces and IP routing processes are not yet fully operational. You might thus miss the first few seconds of the router's operations (unless you store the extra configuration file Flash or NVRAM).

The easiest way to remove all settings from an interface is to use the default interface configuration command. For example, if you've configured Frame Relay interface with subinterfaces ...

interface Serial0/0/0
 no ip address
 encapsulation frame-relay
 load-interval 60
!
interface Serial0/0/0.100 point-to-point
 bandwidth 2000
 ip address 172.16.1.1 255.255.255.252
 ip load-sharing per-packet
 ip ospf cost 50
 frame-relay interface-dlci 100

... and have erase all interface-specific configuration, the ...

rtr(config)#default interface serial 0/0/0
Building configuration...

Interface Serial0/0/0 set to default configuration

... gets you there. As you can see, after the configuration change, the main interface has no IP address and the subinterface is deleted.

a1#show ip interfaces brief
Interface          IP-Address  OK? Method Status     Protocol

... non-relevant lines deleted ...

Serial0/0/0        unassigned  YES TFTP   up         up
Serial0/0/0.100    unassigned  YES manual deleted    down

Sometimes, parts of router configuration get lost during the reload process: although the configuration commands are saved in NVRAM, they are not processed after the reload and thus do not appear in the running configuration. Re-entering these commands manually solves the problem ... but it's obviously not a reliable solution.

Embedded Event Manager (EEM) solves this issue as well. You just configure an applet that triggers on syslog message SYS-5-RESTART and reapplies the necessary configuration commands.

I've always wanted to be able to execute a show command while configuring a router (I'm never good at remembering subinterface numbers). A while ago Cisco introduced the do configuration command that allows you to execute any exec-level command (including telnetting to another device) without leaving the current configuration mode.

Displaying configuration of a single interface can be a time-consuming task if your router has extremely long configuration (for example, high-end device with hundreds of interfaces, route-maps, access-lists etc.). In this case, the interface keyword of the show running-config command becomes extremely useful.

The IOS command line interface has long included unix-style pipes that you could use to limit the output generated by the show commmands. Initially, the only available filters were begin (include everything after the first regular expression match), end (stop the output at the RE match) or include (include only matching lines).

IOS release 12.3(2)T (integrated in 12.4) brought us a few new filters, among them the section filter that includes or excludes whole sections (start of section being defined by a line with no leading space). You can use this filter to focus on parts of your router configuration. For example, to display only the routing protocols configuration, use show running | section include router command.

Of course, you can go a step further and define an alias, for example alias exec events show running | include ^event manager configuration command defines the exec-mode events command that lists all EEM applets.

Recently I had to investigate whether Cisco Router and Security Device Manager (SDM) uses a default username/password, so I was forced to figure out how exactly the SDM works. The minimum functionality needed on an SDM-enabled router is preconfigured Ethernet interface, HTTP server and (optionally) DHCP pool.