This HowTo demonstrates how to configure some basic parameters on your Cisco Router or Cisco Switch running IOS. These commands were run on IOS version 12.4-6.T11. This is the standard stuff that I'd typically put on every Cisco Router or Cisco Switch running IOS in the network. 

**Note feel free to post any questions or comments in the Forums section on this site.

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I figured we've jumped around a bit, but not shown some basic Cisco information from the low-level up. This HowTo format will appear more often in the future. It will consist of the output from the capture of a real procedure on the router, followed by either diagnostic or configuration commands.

In this case you'll see the bootup sequence of a new Cisco 1811 router (which is basically the same sequnce as for any Cisco IOS device), then I'll run the "sho ver" (short for "show version") command. I used "PUTTY" a free download terminal client to record the information below.

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There may be a time when you need to configure 802.1Q Tagging on a router's FastEthernet Interface.

One potential situation is when you have a switch that doesn't have Layer-3 capabilities connected to the router, but you have to segment the hosts connected to the switch into seperate networks. Why? Maybe you have a segments you want to prevent from speaking to each other - you can apply access-lists to the subinterfaces (hint) just as you can a normally configured physical interface.

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This time around we're  going to use NMAP for more than just a basic scan. I really like this tool with all it's switches.

So anyway to find a network device just use nmap with the "-O" switch (that's a capital letter O, for OS detection).

Here's and example where I used this command to determine that a host was a Nortel switch:

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