Cisco Tips for Time Saving Awareness: Smart Skillful and Efficient Navigational Habits for Time Savings Develo

We have seen in one of our previous articles how utilizing specific filtering methods better provides technicians with a more efficient search process to view configuration commands on our routing and switching devices. Refer to (cisco show running-configuration filter) .

While at first it may or may not appear to be such a necessary endeavor at any one particular time, however, if you find yourself constantly in need of opening a console session, it would be most beneficial to develop a smart habit by enforcing these time saving methods.

For example if you’re constantly using the show run command, it may not dawn on you that the amount of time you spend waiting for the routing or switch device to go through the thinking process can add up exponentially. You may find that by the end of the week you spent over an hour or more wasted in watching and scrolling. It reminds me of an old tune by the Moody Blues entitled, “Watching and Waiting” If its not the actual name of the song I assure you that those are the first lines in the song lyrics. J

Being part of a training group in which you coach where one is constantly in an environment surrounded by students and other IT professionals working towards validating their skill sets, its imperative to utilize such time saving approaches. Not to mention that what you demonstrate can positively rub off on to others.

Just to further extrapolate; An IT training facilitator delegated with the chore in need of scrolling through basic configurations from top to bottom, will find the following command, ‘show run exclude !’ , plays a useful role in reducing the time it takes when bypassing all of those seemingly incessant exclamation points, not to mention the time saving benefits when you copy the configuration to a notepad which further complements your time savings when the need arises to add those same configurations on other router or switch devices in your lab or other non productive testing environments.

I know what you may be thinking by now. Your thinking…, “but I like having the exclamation points and besides they are needed because it is important for documenting comments and it assists me in queuing where one configuration ends and where one configuration begins.” No argument here. You’re right. My reasoning for using this sample line command was to emphasize the good habits you are instilling. It is apparently more useful and beneficial using show run begin or show run include as depicted in the article previously referenced, since it sends you to the specific area of the configuration depending on the object you would want to search. Again, an excellent time savings endeavor.

More time saving techniques can be adhered to by practicing the “ do” command which can allow you to apply show commands normally only viewed from the execution mode but instead used in the global configuration terminal mode. Example While in the ( config )# ”Do show ip int brief” (Notice I didn’t say do show run) but you can.

Where is the times savings here for that endeavor? It gives you one less level to scale down to, and one less level to move you back up. Add that up in a days work. J

Let’s take a look at some other fun ‘saving tip’ navigational skills you can do on your switches without using the show run command.

Here is what I will go over: Show vlan-s
Show int tr
Sh eth summ

Let’s say you want to check on the specific trunks that you have configured: Instead of ‘show run’, you can do ‘sh vlans-s’.

You can then view the port numbers that are shown as vlans. If you don’t see a port number then you know the ports that are missing are configured as trunk ports.

On the other hand, you can do a ‘sh int tr’: short for show interface trunk; this will provide you a view of which ports are set up as trunk ports.

The command ‘sh eth summ’: short for show ether-channel summary. This would provide us with the ports configured as Ether channel groups, assuming they were configured. If nothing shows up, that means none have been configured.

Ether Channel is used to provide for load balancing and fault tolerance, but that is for another topic at another time, and is beyond the scope of this article.

These are only just a few command lines to help us become more aware of time saving skills that we would otherwise unknowingly drain away in our daily schedule.

By enforcing smart and skillful navigational habits, we will be keeping our minds sharp and our actions more efficient in many endeavors we undertake.

Keep on practicing.