Hi, I thought since I had recently purchased a Cisco Catalyst 2950 switch to share a few little tips and tricks.
Just look on Ebay since gibts always what for an apple and an egg. There should already be a console port on the router or switch. Alternatively, you can also do this in PacketTracer.
Ok what do we need for this?
- Cisco switch or Cisco router
- Miniterm, Minicom or PuTTy
- RJ45 to RS232 Cisco console cable
- USB2RS232 adapter
- Power 😄
How to connect?
Ok how do you connect to the device? Simple, just connect the cable to the blue Console RJ45 port. Connect the whole thing with the RS232 adapter to the laptop or PC and you're ready to go.
Then connect with Miniterm in my case and off you go.
First of all I would like to introduce the Begin, Include and Exclude command. With these commands, we can pipe over and make life easier, because we don't have to look at the complete output anymore, but can filter.
With the command "include" we can output everything that contains certain keywords.
With the command "exclude" you can omit everything that contains certain keywords.
With the command "begin" you can display everything where the given keyword appears for the first time.
I have made a small example video.
Another handy command is "do" which can be compared to sudo, well half but what it can do is really handy.
With the command "do" you can execute all commands from any level up to the entry level.
These are the tricks that make life easier in the network administration 😄