Poking around, find out what's there.

Once you've got your router plugged in and you're logged in (either on the console [preferred] or telnet-ed in) there's some things that you can do to see what type of interfaces you have availible.

To get started, I normally do a:

cisco# show int ac

this will show all of your routers interfaces, their descriptions, a note if they're disabled, and some packet counters. ie:

cisco# show int ac
Ethernet0 
                Protocol    Pkts In   Chars In   Pkts Out  Chars Out
                      IP     610356  115097881     742541  217076641
                     ARP      33830    2029800       8586     515160
                     CDP          0          0      32955   10018320
Serial0 sample.org T1
                Protocol    Pkts In   Chars In   Pkts Out  Chars Out
                      IP     800831  209840619     631037   89882519
                     CDP          0          0      32954    9655522
Interface Serial1 is disabled

router#

Also a show version is helpful, and generally will tell you how much memory is installed. On larger routers, show diag is availible which shows information about all cards installed on the router.

To view the running configuration, do a show running which is only availible on newer versions of IOS - to view the boot time config run show config - any time you change the configuration via the config command you will want to save your configuration with the command write mem.

Most of the 7000 and above series of routers have one or more thermometers inside which allow you to get various temperature readings - use the command show env all to view temperature and power supply information.

Last Updated: Sun Oct 4 10:37:10 PDT 1998

This is part of Nik's website - email me with questions or comments at nikm@cyberflunk.com.