Easiest way to save multiple Router/Switch configurations?

bbugyi200

I have a CCNA lab at home complete with 3 Cisco 1841 routers, a 2960 switch, a 3550 switch, and a 3560 switch. I am looking for an easy way to upload certain configurations on these devices when needed.

I don't like leaving my lab online all day, so some of the configuration changes I have to make every day can get a bit tedious. For example, it took me about a week to review a chapter on OSPF. Every day I would have to re-setup the OSPF and ip configurations on all 3 routers. And sometimes this is just simply to see the output of a certain show command, or something stupid like that.

So this leaves me with 3 options as far as I see it:

1. Save the configs to the start-up config, and then just use the erase startup-config command at the end of this chapter.
a. The only thing that I don't like about this idea is that certain settings do not seem to be saved into the Startup-config. For example, when I did this on some of my switches all of the VLAN settings seemed to keep. I believe they are stored in the flash, so I could clear them if I wanted to. Are there any other configurations that I have to worry about saving into an unexpected location?

2. Use a TFTP server on my computer to save these configs, and then just use the copy tftp running-config to bring back my configurations from the previous day.
a. I have a dedicated NIC on my computer that I could use for this kind of thing, but I would still need to configure the proper interface settings on each Cisco device before I could get a connection to the TFTP server. This might be more trouble then its worth.

3. You have a better idea !!!

networker050184

I'd just save them to flash unless you have so many it takes up too much space. You should also familiarize yourself with the vlan.dat file and how/where it is saved.

bbugyi200

Thanks for the reply Networker. Hmmm. I didn't know that I could save a configuration file to the flash!

I will look into this. Thank you!!!