This lab provided me with some hands-on experience with the Cisco IOS CLI.
The first step was opening the CLI for R1 by clicking it, navigating to CLI, and pressing return to start.
To change the hostnames of the routers I would need to enter global configuration mode by entering the ‘configure terminal’ command or conf t for short.
In global configuration mode, I used the ‘hostname’ command followed by R1 to change the hostname. I also used enable password to configure an unencrypted password of ‘CCNA’ on the router.
I repeated these same steps for the switch. I will only show the rest of the commands on one device but perform them on both to build my memory of these commands.
The next step was to use the ‘exit’ command to revert to user EXEC mode and test the password. When entering the password Cisco does not display the text for security purposes.
Continuing, I needed to view the password in the current running configuration. To do this I would use the ‘show running-config command.
I used the ‘service password-encryption’ command to enable encryption so the password would not display in plain text.
I wanted to view my newly encrypted password but realized I needed to exit global configuration mode to do so. This is because show running-config needs to be entered in privileged EXEC mode.
There is a loophole for this though, by using the ‘do’ command, you can show running-config from global configuration mode.
The 7 next to the password in the image above refers to the type of encryption used. The string of numbers that follows is the password CCNA encrypted to be unreadable so shoulder surfers can not read our password. Keep in mind that the ‘service password-encryption’ command isn’t very secure, so should not be relied upon against brute force.
To enable more secure encryption we will be using the ‘enable secret’ command.
As you can see, the ‘enable secret’ command is using a different, more secure encryption method known as MD5.
The final step is to save the running configuration to the startup configuration. There are 3 ways to accomplish this.
‘Copy run’ ‘Write memory’ and ‘copy running-config startup config’
In conclusion, this lab solidified my knowledge of these basic Cisco IOS CLI commands. I’ve always enjoyed interacting with CLIs on any OS, and this was no different. I look forward to becoming more adept with Cisco commands in the future.
