CISCO IOS in a Nutshell

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 city initials, followed by a number. Then, late one night when you’re staring at a blank terminal screen trying to remember the name of the backbone router in New York, you can type rtr-ny-01 and be reasonably confident that you’ve guessed correctly.

Warning

Don’t use underscores ( _ ) in router names. They are hard to type, often lead to confusion, and aren’t legal in Domain Name System (DNS) names. Use a hyphen (-) instead. Similarly, avoid mixing upper- and lowercase. Instead of “routerOneNewYork”, use “router-one-newyork”. The router won’t care, but your users will!