Learn Cisco Network Administration in a Month of Lunches

Chapter 18. Securing Cisco devices

If you work in a Windows Active Directory environment, you’re accustomed to having a single credential—that is, a username and password—to log into almost everything. Sadly, many Cisco networks haven’t adopted this “one credential to rule them all” approach. Instead, it’s quite common to find that each device requires nothing more than a generic administrator password to log in and start making changes. In slightly more secure environments, the devices may require a unique username and password.

One downside of this setup is that when you want to give someone access to several devices, you have to manually configure a credential on each one. For example, a company I once worked for hired a contractor to configure ...