The Local Zoo - Cisco Troubleshooting and Configuration

Tools for configuring Cisco devices

There are two tools which I find essential when configuring Cisco devices, be they switches, routers or firewalls. First of all, there's Edit Pad Pro. It allows you to view your configurations, using colour schemes, that you can configure yourself, and link to the file extension. I personally save Pix configurations as *.pix, and router configurations as *.rtr, and link both file types to this custom colour scheme (I even used the program to write every page on this web site, again using custom colour schemes). When you've got your configuration file, you need to upload it to/amend it on your device. For this I use Absolute Telnet. To me this is the perfect tool. It allows telnet and direct com communications, and can use the various encrypted communication types, such as SSH1 and SSH2, using various encryption methods, which you can lock down yourself. There's very little I can't do with regards to Cisco devices, that these two tools can't handle.