Now that my PC is connected to the console port of a Cisco router
let’s have a look at the initial startup
now some tips, if you don’t get any output on the screen of your PC
when you connect to the Cisco router or switch, check your cabling
so make sure that your cables are connected properly
make sure that the power is connected to the Cisco router switch correctly
make sure that the console cable is connected to the console port and not to another port
Make sure that you’ve turn the router on.
So as an example you need to push the power on switch on a router
typically low end switches don’t have a power on button
so its simply connect the power cable to the switch and would boot up
but on the router, typically you need to turn the router on of connecting power.
So now let’s watch the startup process on this router.
The first thing I'm going to do is reboot the router by using the reload command.
I don’t wanna to save any configuration on this router because
I want you to see what a router looks like, when it boots up with no configuration.
So I’m gonna say no for saving the config and I'll hit enter to confirm
that I want to proceed with the reload.
We can now see that the reload was requested, so if you're connected
to the console of a router and turned on the router.
You would see something similar to this on your screen from a router that just booted up.
What you can see in the output, in this example is that
the router has 131072 kilobytes of memory.
If we take that and divide by 1024, we can see that it gives us a value of 128 mega of RAM
which doesn’t seem much when compared to the gigabytes of RAM in PC's today.
This is a 2801 router and you can see that over here.
the router is decompressing the image, so it's booting up the image
in the output we can see which IOS software the router is using
we can see the version and we can see that this is 2801 router software.
We can see once again that this is a Cisco 2801 router
we can see how much RAM has been installed in the router
now you need to add these 2 values together and when divided by 1024
we can work out the Megs of RAM installed in the router.
The value showing here are in kilobytes, so you need to divide by 1024
to convert it into megabytes, so in this example
the router has a 128 meg of RAM and this is a 2801 router.
In this example the router has 2 Ethernet interfaces and 2 serial interfaces.
You can also see the amount of flash installed in the router.
So in this example we’ve got 62592 kilobytes of flash available.
you can also see the amount of NVRAM available which is very, very small in comparison
there’s only 191 kilobytes of NVRAM available.
Now in this example the router is trying to boot with the configuration
found on a TFTP server, so it's sending out a broadcast looking for a TFTP server
that has a network config file or Cisco net.cfg file available.
this is actually been around for many years and was called slarp
what the routers trying to do essentially is trying find the config on a TFTP server
and then boot up with that configuration.
We’re not interested in using that at the moment, in this example
there is no TFTP server available on the network with those configuration files.
The next thing that displays is the initial configuration dialogue.
Now as mentioned most Cisco engineers will not use the initial configuration dialogue.
I’m just gonna show it to you now so you can see what’s its all about
but in the real world it’s unlikely that you going to use this for most deployments.
so in this example I’m gonna say yes and notice we're told
that we can use question mark for help at any time.
Control c will break out of the initial configuration dialogue.
So it’s worth remembering that control c
allows you to abort this configuration dialogue at any prompt.
The word in square brackets is the default, so if you just hit enter at any prompt
that’s the option that’s gonna be selected.
I’m gonna answer no for basic management set up
but say yes to see the interfaces available.
I can now see an interface list.
So we can now see as an example
that the router got an IP address on its serial interface.
we didn’t configure that, notice the method selected is slarp
the router try to connect via its serial interface to a TFTP server
to get an initial configuration that however timed out in our example.
I'll give a router a name such as R1 in this example
now we're going to discuss passwords in more detail later.
There are different types of passwords but for now let’s just give
the router a secret password and enable password of Cisco 1.
In brief, a secret password is encrypted and should be used and enable password
is shown in clear text in the running and saved configuration of a Cisco device
and generally shouldn’t be used in today’s environments.
We’ll talk more about passwords and how to secure your devices in another video.
VTY lines are used for telnet and SSH connections
so we can set up virtual terminal passwords here
I'll give the router a password of cisco, obviously in this example
I’m using very simple passwords, in the real world
you would use much better passwords than a password of cisco, I hope.
Let’s say no to configuring SNMP network management, Simple Network Management Protocol
or SNMP can be used by central management stations for the management
of multiple network devices as well as gathering statistics
of CPU, utilization, network interface utilization and others statistic.
I’m gonna saying no to the configuration of IP
in this example I’m gonna say no to CLNS which is a protocol
that you probably won't encounter unless you're running a router protocols
such as ISIS I'll also say no to bridging, we don’t wanna turn this router into a bridge.
Now in this example the router has an old ISDN interface
so their are various options that allows to configure the ISDN
but in today’s world ISDN is not typically used, so we gonna skip all the options here.
So well just go with the defaults showing here
but we won't worry about configuring ISDN at all in these videos.
We're then prompted if we wanna configure the first FastEthernet interface on the router.
What I want you to see is that the router is prompting you with multiple questions
to help you configure the device and depending on how your answers the various questions.
The router will prompt you for more information
on how to configure various options on the device.