Christy Williams University of Phoenix- Profressor Sims Wk 6 Assignment Router & Switch Conf.

"Let’s go through the basic steps of setting up a Cisco router to provide Internet access to a small network. I’ll assume you have some basic IOS knowledge, including how to log on and how to save and clear configurations. I’ll also assume that you have a solid understanding of networking, including what Network Address Translation (NAT) is. I won’t cover items such as setting up Secure Shell (SSH) access and hardening access lists. You can expand into those areas as you feel comfortable and want to experiment more.

What You’ll Need
You need a Cisco router with at least two Ethernet interfaces. An 806, 836, 851, or 871 is ideal for a home or small office setup—in fact, that’s what those models are geared towards. You can buy an 851 for a few hundred dollars from various online retailers. However, a 2610 works just as well, and you might have one sitting in the equipment bin at your office that you can ask to borrow.

Your router should have IOS 12.2 or later. This article is based on a Cisco 851W with IOS 12.4, including the IOS firewall feature set.

You also need a Cisco console cable (sometimes called a rollover cable). One end has an eight-position, eight-conductor modular jack to connect to the router; the other end has a DB-9 serial connector. In recent years, the console cables that Cisco has shipped with its equipment have been light blue.

You need a computer with a DB-9 serial port. In my experience, USB-to-serial converters work just fine for this application. You also need a computer with a terminal emulation program. Hilgraeve’s HyperTerminal is available with Windows XP, but it was removed from Windows Vista. Vista users can download Hyper- Terminal Private Edition 6.3 at www.hilgraeve.com/htpe/download.html. Mac OS X users can Google for ZTerm, and Linux users, for minicom.

1. Connect the router to the PC, and start a terminal emulation program
Connect your router to your PC with the console cable, and fire up your terminal emulation program. The port settings are 9600,8,N,1. If you’ve never before accessed a device directly via an asynchronous serial connection, you might want to ask a Cisco veteran for some assistance.

Start with the command enable to get into privileged EXEC mode. Then type the command erase startup-config to get a blank configuration. Next, restart the router with the reload command. Make sure to say no to an IOS prompt that asks if you’d like to enter the initial configuration dialog.

These steps might sound confusing if you’ve worked only with Cisco devices that are up and running in production. In that case, you’re probably more accustomed to using Telnet, or preferably SSH, to configure the equipment. That isn’t an option when you want to start with a blank configuration, which will prevent any Telnet or SSH access to the equipment for the time being.

2. Identify the router’s interfaces
Take a look at the back of your router and identify which Ethernet ports you’ll be using for what. One will connect to your WAN device, such as a cable modem; another will connect to your LAN. If you’re using an 851W, like me, you’ll notice that the ports are labeled for you—FastEthernet4 is the WAN interface and FastEthernet0 through FastEthernet3 are the LAN interfaces. The 851 includes a built-in four-port switch, hence the four LAN interfaces.

If your router’s interfaces aren’t labeled, you can type the command

show ip interface brief from privileged EXEC mode to find the names.

Continued on page 2

3. Configure IP addresses
Now you can begin the actual setup. You should still be in privileged EXEC mode (if not, enter the enable command), and start terminal configuration mode by entering

configure terminal
Type the command

no ip domain lookup to prevent IOS from attempting to convert any spelling mistakes you make into domain names. You can skip this step if you’re a perfect typist, I suppose(Dragone 2008)."

"There are five configurations a network administrator should apply to a newly provisioned switch or router. Although application of these configurations may seem like common sense, 90% of devices I see are missing at least one of these settings, and about 75% are missing two or more. Use this checklist as an action item to verify your existing devices have these settings, at minimum, and integrate these in to any templates or provisioning documents you use. You'll appreciate the results of the consistency this adds to your network management and monitoring.

Define a default gateway or default route
Let's start with the fantastically easy one--a management IP and default gateway. Obviously, you can't manage a device across the network unless it has, at bare minimum, a management IP address. Instead of harping on the obvious, instead take note that many times when edge devices are provisioned, an IP address is configured but the default gateway or default route is forgotten or omitted.

What happens when this configuration is missing? Those edge switches will hum along happily until one of three things happens:

Your management tool is installed or moved to a different subnet.
You try to manage the switch from a different network or subnet.
You begin adding other VLANs or subnets to the switch.

Without a default gateway or route off of the network the switch is using, traffic may reach the switch, but it won't find its way back off that network. You won't believe how many edge devices are in the wild with this grievous omission, often resulting in the switch becoming unmanaged, by virtue of the management tools not able to see it.

Cisco & HP Networking:
# ip default-gateway
# ip route 0.0.0.0 0.0.0.0

Set the time
If I could ask administrators to set only one configuration out of the box after the basic IP settings, I'd ask for this: the correct time. Correct time on a switch is vital when troubleshooting the device. A string of log entries dated 1/1/90 are useless to network administrators troubleshooting a problem.

The three most popular ways to set time on a device are manual time settings, TimeP or Network Time Protocol (NTP), and Simple NTP (SNTP). You should really have a time server in your environment to keep the network all in sync. If you don't have a time server now, you can very easily add one. In Windows Server environments, a few clicks will have you up and running with SNTP in less than 5 minutes. You can also use public (Internet-hosted) time servers, although you shouldn't put yourself in a position to force each switch to call out over the Internet for time. As a last resort, set the time manually, but, by all means, set it somehow.

Cisco:
# ntp server
# clock timezone
# show clock

HP Networking:
# ip timep manual
# timesync timep
# clock timezone
Or
# sntp server
# sntp unicast
# timsync sntp
# show time

Enable neighbor discovery
Neighbor discovery protocols are essential for network administrators and management tools to accurately construct a view of the network topology. Each manufacturer has its own supported mix of neighbor discovery protocols, loosely based on how standards-focused that vendor is and how much it wants to pay in royalties to use proprietary protocols. The two most widely used are LLDP (Link Layer Discovery Protocol), an IEEE standard, and CDP (Cisco Discovery Protocol). Support varies by brand and at times even by model or firmware versions. What you may see in some devices is LLDP supported for listening and talking, but only the only CDP support is for listening. Others may offer equal capabilities for both protocols.

Enabling all supported neighbor discovery methods is highly recommended. The information it provides lets you immediately locate neighboring switches and even media endpoints such as phones and access points that use LLDP-MED, an extension of LLDP. Not only can you see where these devices are connected, you can get details of the device type, its host name, IP address and even what port it's connected to on the other end. In a similar fashion, your network monitoring and management tools will use these protocols to crawl the network, discover new devices, and correctly identify and show interswitch links.

Cisco: CDP is enabled by default, Enable LLDP
# lldp run
# show lldp neighbors
HP Networking: LLDP is enabled by default. Enable CDP receive only support
# show lldp info remote
# show cdp neighbors
Configure logging and traps
Notifications of events on the network are a critical component of monitoring, troubleshooting and real-time alerting. Most switches offer two primary means of sending this data to a central repository: logging events via syslog and trap events via SNMP ((Simple Network Management Protocol). Configuration of both is simple, usually varying minimally from switch to switch and even from brand to brand.

Most organizations have a syslog server or a management tool configured to receive SNMP traps. If yours doesn't have such an application, I'd strongly encourage you to use this opportunity to investigate your options. If you don't have budget or time, look at your existing management tools and you'll likely find something you can use already in production. If not, there are a variety of free syslog and SNMP tools; just make sure you download free tools from a source you trust.

Cisco & HP Networking:
# logging
# snmp-server host

Add custom SNMP communities
SNMP is used to manage or monitor all types of devices in a network, including switches, servers and even desktops. SNMP allows us to define different community strings that are mapped to different access rights. Most simply, we have a read-only string and a read-write string. The read-only string lets monitoring tools see and gather information from the device, whereas the read-write string allows management tools to make modifications and configuration changes to the device. By default, switches most often have either no predefined strings or they use a combination of public and private(Minella 2012)."

Reference
Dragone,Michael. May 26,2008. 9 Steps to Setting Up a Cisco Router. Windows ITPro. May 24,2013. http://windowsitpro.com/networking/9-steps-setting-cisco-router

Minella,Jennifer. January 30,2012. 5 basic switch setting you must know. Network Computing. May 20,2013 http://www.networkcomputing.com/data-networking-management/5-basic-switch-settings-you-must-know/232500647?nomobile=1