Thursday, September 27, 2007

My Favorite Router Commands

I hate to wait for anything, and I hate for anything to slow my momentum when I am trying to get something done. Unfortunately, Cisco routers, by default, are designed to make me mad.

First of all, they are designed to lookup every single command you type--or mis-type. First, the router looks in its own database of known commands. It then goes out to a domain server to look for additional commands. If you have not established a domain server (why would you?) then it goes to 255.255.255.255 and waits for someone to respond to the request. Of course, no one will. After an eternity (I think it is 30 seconds) it times out. If you are fast but inaccurate, you will see this alot and it will drive you nuts. Fortunately, there is a remedy:

Router(config)#no ip domain-lookup

That one is going to save me from having a full head of gray by the time I am 40.

Another thing that drives me batty is when the router is scrolling errors while I am trying to read an output or type in a long command. If an interface is bouncing or EIGRP is running into issues, I would rather the router wait until I am done typing before it scrolls its lines of complaint. Therefore, when I am configuring the logins for console and vty, I add the following line:
Router(config-line)#logging synchronous

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