Cisco Troubleshooting

Remote Telnet useful tips!

We all work remotely with Cisco routers and Switches, we often do login to do some configuration changes in the Cisco routers and Switches. What if we configured wrongly in the live Cisco routers and Switches which are located in the remote sites, we don’t enjoy the liberty of resetting the devices unless we have control over the power distribution.

In this scenario the “reload” command proves to be very handy and useful. Just before making any changes to the configuration we can use the “reload” command as demonstrated below

ITKE-Cisco#reload in ?

Delay before reload (mmm or hhh:mm)

ITKE-Cisco#reload in 10

System configuration has been modified. Save? [yes/no]: no

Building configuration…

[OK]

Reload scheduled in 10 minutes by yasir on vty0 (10.0.0.5)

Proceed with reload? [confirm]

ITKE-Cisco#

ITKE-Cisco#

***

*** — SHUTDOWN in 0:05:00 —

***

The above demonstrated command will reload the device in 10 minutes. After applying the “reload” command we can proceed with the configuration changes. If things go wrong and we lost connectivity

to the device, then try back after 10 minutes as the device will get reloaded with the original startup-configuration which can helps us to restore the connectivity to the device.

Once we are sure about the new configuration and its working properly without any hassles there is always a way  “reload cancel” command is there to cancel the reload.

ITKE-Cisco#reload cancel

I find this command to be very handy and useful especially when we have to telnet or SSH to remote Cisco router or a Switch.