Course young fighter cisco: the art of owning a console

Introduction: Many new network hardware tuners are afraid of the console (CLI, Command Line Interface) as fire. No wonder: you do not have tooltips on the mouse cursor, nor beautiful pictures for you, but only incomprehensible letters on a black (green, white) background. Scary ...

However, the console is a powerful tool, without mastering which you cannot call yourself the cisco configuration.

Using the console, you can:
1. Set the initial configuration.
2. Recover lost passwords (for different hardware in different ways. But a search on cisco.com makes it easy to find the process for the keywords “password-recovery (name of the hardware)”)
3. Configure custom topologies.
4. Enable hidden features
5. Verify correctness with show commands.
6. Debug the process with debug commands
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Remember: with the help of the console everything is possible, with the help of the GUI - not everything, but only what was programmed and resolved.

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

Of course, it takes a lot of training :) However, there are several tricks that will facilitate the work and can be useful in real life to quickly localize and solve problems or pass the CCIE exam :)

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

Trick 2: On routers and switches, use the do command to 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 no need to exit setup mode and go back to it. Because console teams are tree-like, then running around modes really takes time and effort.

Important : There is a subtlety: when using the do command, the help on the question, the tab button and the syntax check for error do not work. Therefore, if you do not know exactly which show command you want to enter, you will still have to exit setup mode

Trick 3: Use a sample from the config or output of other viewing commands. To do this, there are service 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 notepad or another text editor to create a config template, and then paste it with a paste-paste into the console. The cisko carriage transfer is recognized as a command input. Do not forget to press the enter button after the last command :)

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

Trick 6: Do not forget that different commands can be entered from different modes: from the unprivileged user mode you can do little and see, from the privileged one you can see, enable debug , from the configuration mode you can set parameters or switch to submodes. Do not forget that the “?” Character entered without a space will indicate the possible continuation of the command, and the “?” Character entered through the space, possible further keywords

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

To accelerate learning, use the tab button: if the beginning of the command is already clear, the tsiska will continue the command automatically.

Trick 8: Lines from the config (running or startup) are commands. You can peek into the config and erase an unwanted command by putting the keyword no in front of it

In general, as elsewhere: perseverance and a little effort!

Dare and let everything work out :)

SUVZh, Sergey Fedorov, cisco instructor