Cisco IOS in a Nutshell, 2nd Edition

Chapter 3. Basic Router Configuration

Managing a handful of routers quickly becomes a large task, and managing thousands of routers is even worse. You can minimize your administrative burden by configuring your routers carefully, completely, and consistently. I strongly recommend that you use every helpful item possible—even if the configuration item is not required. Every moment spent doing configuration groundwork translates into many hours saved when you are troubleshooting or performing maintenance tasks. When you try to solve a network problem at 2 A.M., the importance of properly configured routers becomes painfully clear.

This chapter covers most of the configuration items that make routers more manageable and easier to tame.

Setting the Router Name

The examples in this book use “Router” as the router ’s name. That’s fine for examples, but a bad idea in real life. Eventually, a router should be given a name. To set the router name to “Sphinx”, use the hostname command:

Router(config)#hostname Sphinx
Sphinx(config)#

The router instantly responds by updating the prompt to reflect the new router name. The name can be up to 254 characters long, but don’t use a name so long that you can’t type it comfortably.

It’s a good practice to follow a naming convention for your routers. With a logical, consistent naming scheme, it’s easy to remember a router’s name, or guess the name if you’ve forgotten it. For example, let’s say that your router names all start with “rtr”, followed by the ...