Knowledge required to manually setup ISR

dontstop

Hey all,

Today I found an 857w ISR laying around and started to configure it. Just having started my journey into CCENT I'm curious to know would a CCENT/CCNA student be expected to know how to configure such a device manually? Or is that something which comes a bit later on? I ended up using SDM to configure the device

networker050184

Yes I'd certainly expect anyone with a CCENT/CCNA to be able to configure a router from the CLI.

GSXR750K2

I've seen/heard talk that CLI is becoming "antiquated", but I'm personally not so sure. I hope it's just a cult movement talking that way. I once worked in an environment that required us to use command line for Windows Server administration because the management bandwidth between hundreds of sites was unsuitable for a GUI, so in some instances you may not have a choice.

I'm not old school and like GUIs as much as the next guy, but I think knowing CLI would be extremely beneficial, even if it is not considered necessary. You don't want to get caught not knowing it a year or so down the road, and if you want to do some consulting it's unlikely your clients will spring for high-end products like Prime, and CCP can be annoying.

dontstop

The CCENT seems to cover more information about Enterprise routers than residential DSL equipment. Would it be just a case of reading through the Cisco documentation to figure out how to setup the device?

james43026

A CLI becoming antequated is something that may happen in 20+ years. Much like IPv4 becoming antequated and replaced by IPv6, everyone has been talking about how IPv4 is going to be out the door soon, but realistically we are pretty far off still. But for the time being, managing Cisco equipment VIA CLI in most environments will be the standard. SDM isn't something that a lot of organizations have adopted, but other vendors, like Palo Alto have a really good GUI, and their certification exams actually require that you do most configs in the GUI and not the CLI. Personally I think you learn more when doing configs in a CLI, as you actually gain a better understanding of how something works. Which when it comes time to troubleshooting, really helps.

dontstop

I think my question has been lost in translation, I'm not debating the CLI as a means for configuration of the device but rather coming from the standpoint of a new student studying the CCENT content. Most of the equipment we configure during the course is Enterprise hardware and we seem to shy away from DSL configurations. Just having configured an ISR using SDM and looking at the config file output I found most of the commands and configuration I've never come across before in any of the study books. My original question is, at what point does a Cisco Student/Engineer learn this during his/her studies? Or is this something you just have to go out and learn on your own.

Again please note: I only used SDM because I wanted to see how it configured the ISR as I had no clue in the CLI.

networker050184

Cisco and their certifications are aimed at the enterprise market. You aren't likely to come across much info about home networking without branching out on your own. At the end of the day once you learn the basics it's simple to look up the command to implement something new.

dontstop

networker050184 wrote: »

Cisco and their certifications are aimed at the enterprise market. You aren't likely to come across much info about home networking without branching out on your own. At the end of the day once you learn the basics it's simple to look up the command to implement something new.

Thanks for the reply! That makes sense

OctalDump

From what I can recall of CCNA and CCNP studies, dialer interfaces for DSL weren't really ever explored. I'm not even sure if the current version of CCNA (v3) still has the necessary PPP bits covered. I'd expect that by the end of CCNA R+S, you'd be able to find the relevant bits for the DSL interface and configure it. From the CLI, it's just text, so copy and paste pretty much.

If you want to learn, an easy way is to do the config through SDM and then look at the config from CLI to see what config commands relate to what you did in SDM.

Even with CCNA (or CCNP), there will probably be bits of standard configs that you don't need to know about.

The 800 SoHo devices are a bit tricky also with CCNA, since they collapse a whole bunch of functions into one device (router, switch, WAP, dsl etc). So when you are just starting out it can be confusing to understand what's what. The CCNA R+S courses/labs/books tend to just focus on one thing at a time, and use single function devices - so you have a router for routing and a switch for switching.