Cisco IOS Cookbook, 2nd Edition

Configuring the Router via TFTP

Problem

You want to load configuration commands via TFTP.

Solution

You can use the copy tftp: command to configure the router via the Trivial File Transfer Protocol (TFTP):

Router1#copy tftp://172.25.1.1/NEWCONFIG running-config
Destination filename [running-config]? <enter>
Accessing tftp://172.25.1.1/NEWCONFIG...
Loading NEWCONFIG from 172.25.1.1 (via FastEthernet0/0.1): !
[OK - 24 bytes]

24 bytes copied in 0.192 secs (125 bytes/sec)
Router1#

Tip

IOS versions before 12.0 used the command configure network. This command is still available in more recent versions, but it is now deprecated and may not continue to be available in the future.

Discussion

Generally, most people configure their routers by using Telnet and the configure terminal command. For large configuration changes, people tend to resort to cutting and pasting a large set of commands. While this method works, it is inefficient and slow, particularly if you have to configure large numbers of routers. When you use TFTP to download a large set of configuration commands, the router doesn’t need to echo each character to your screen, which reduces the overhead and increases the speed.

In our example, we configured the router by making it download the file called NEWCONFIG from the server at 172.25.1.1 by using the Trivial File Transfer Protocol (TFTP). The router will copy the entire file via TFTP before entering the commands into the running configuration. This is extremely useful because sometimes ...