Author name: Andrew Walding

Anyone who has network admin access can make changes to the running configuration on a router or switch at any time. If you are running a large IT shop or in charge of just a few folks, this feature will enable you to control the concurrent changes to your running configuration. Exclusive Configuration Change Access,

Sometimes, we need to transfer IOS from one router/platform to another. Other times, we can end up in Rommon> prompt because an IOS download failed of similar issue. Let’s start with a stranded router. It is strongly suggested that you get a PCMCIA memory card, insert it into a good router. From priviledged mode on

If you are like many users of the latest IOS, you may find your routers constantly outputting a mesage like this: cell_pe1# %Error opening tftp://255.255.255.255/cisconet.cfg (Timed out) 19:20:43: %SYS-4-CONFIG_RESOLVE_FAILURE: System config parse from (tftp://255.255.255.255/cisconet.cfg) failed The reason for this message is the router is attempting to autoload the configuration files after a restart. So to

This How To discusses how to set up one Cisco Router as a PKI Server and one Cisco Router as a client. That’s right, you can set up a Cisco router as a Certificate Authority (CA) and then set up other routers as clients to use that CA to authenticate on your network.  The advantage

As VoIP becomes more widely used in the enterprise, the number of voice calls traversing the enterprise WAN becomes larger and larger. Typically the use of a proper codec is implemented to reduce the amount of bandwidth a voice call requires. The most commonly used codec for WAN voice traffic is called G.729. While there

CAR — or “rate limiting” — is a method for managing unwanted traffic on your network and making sure it doesn’t affect important traffic. Essentially, CAR controls the bandwidth of a certain type of traffic, and an access control list (ACL) defines which traffic it controls. Once you’ve created the ACL, you can set CAR

Show Version is a great command for routers, switches or PIX firewalls. Here is a look at all the things you can verify with the show version command: On Routers The version of the IOS operating system The version of the ROM bootstrap The version of the boot loader How someone last powered on the

A common question folks ask is “How do you check the bandwidth utilization on a router?” It is a great question and the answer is not as easy as you would expect. There are tools that accomplish this (i.e. NetFlow and there is another mentioned at the end of this page). However, without those tools,

The Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) allows internal and external networks or autonomous systems (AS’s) to exchange routes. BGP is a path-vector routing protocol, which simply means that its job is to exchange routing information between autonomous systems to find the most efficient path for your data to the Internet. Each BGP router connects to its

When a router learns multiple routes to a specific network via multiple routing processes (or routing protocols, such as RIP, RIPv2, IGRP, EIGRP, and OSPF), it installs the route with the lowest administrative distance in the routing table. Load balancing is a standard functionality of the router software, and is available across all router platforms.