In a previous post, I've described how you could generate a (almost) continuous ping from a router using the extended ping command. While that approach is extremely simple to implement, it ties up a line (and if you're working from the console, it's highly impractical). You could get the same results (as Tom has already pointed out) using IP SLA feature of Cisco IOS. Configure the ping request with commands similar to these:

Whenever a router running CEF switching has LAN interfaces (or any other multi-access interfaces), you'll find cached adjacencies for active directly attached IP neighbors in its CEF table. These adjacencies ensure the smooth traffic flow toward the LAN-attached next-hops (preventing the initial packet drop symptom once the next-hop becomes active).

One of my readers made an interesting observation when faced with configuring zone-based firewall on Cisco IOS: „My main issue is a confusion between when to use self and when to use in/outside.“

The rules are simple:

During network troubleshooting or proof-of-concept testing, I often change the state of a loopback interface (to insert or remove an IP prefix from the routing protocols) or flap it to test the impact on network stability. The traditional approach to this procedure should be known to everyone:

Before trying to write Tcl procedures to be executed by Cisco IOS tclsh command, read the following articles:

• Running Tcl procedures from IOS command line
• Tclsh command line parameters
• Where does Tcl output go
• Executing IOS commands from Tcl shell
• IOS scripting with Tcl (IOS 12.3T documentation)
• TCL'ing your Cisco router

And last but not least, if you want to store Tcl procedures on your router and don't want to write into the router's Flash memory (I hate that the router prompts me whether I want to erase the flash every time I store something into it), you can store them in NVRAM.

Cisco IOS allows you to configure the ip default-gateway, but most often it looks like this setting is ignored. In fact, the default gateway is only used when an IOS device does not perform IP routing (acts like an IP host), for example, when you configure a Catalyst switch for layer-2 switching ... or when you disable IP routing on a router with no ip routing configuration command. In both cases, the show ip route command (or show ip redirects on some Catalyst switches) displays the default gateway and any ICMP redirects received from directly attached routers:

In his latest Q&A post, Scott Morris mentioned an excellent Cisco article that describes routing tricks needed to implement sinkholes and remote blackholes in great details. Highly recommended reading.

IOS release 12.2(13)T (integrated in IOS release 12.3) has added the capability to redirect output of an IOS show command to a file. This feature uses Unix-style pipes (similar to the include, exclude and section keywords) and adds append, redirect and tee (redirect + print) keywords.

The show output can be redirected to a local filename (in flash, on usb token or even in NVRAM) or sent to a remote server (currently only FTP and TFTP servers are supported). For example, the show ip interface brief | redirect ftp://student:lab@192.168.0.10/ifstatus command will store the current interface status to an FTP server.

I've always wanted a short summary display of DLCIs configured on my Frame Relay boxes (or whatever your favorite WAN technology is), but the only printout I would get from the router would be the lengthy show frame pvc printout. Fortunately, a judicious use of output filters can get you a summary printout from almost anything Cisco IOS produces.

Sometimes, parts of router configuration get lost during the reload process: although the configuration commands are saved in NVRAM, they are not processed after the reload and thus do not appear in the running configuration. Re-entering these commands manually solves the problem ... but it's obviously not a reliable solution.

Embedded Event Manager (EEM) solves this issue as well. You just configure an applet that triggers on syslog message SYS-5-RESTART and reapplies the necessary configuration commands.