After having some interviews where I’ve been asked about routing on linux solutions, I’ve decided to playaround with Quagga. As always, you can find all the info already on the internet. And in my case Brian Kletter had all the necessary info to setup the environment. Here’s the link on how to setup a linux server with quagga software. And here the initial setup for quagga.

Just got a used Catalyst 3500-XL switch and don’t have credentials? Did you forget your auth credentials or you just want to have fun?

In case you will need it, here’s a thing that helped me out once. In case you want to append some config lines that you have stored in a file and if you can’t copy it through SFTP, you can make it locally. To do this you need to start tclsh and create the file puts [open "flash:filename" w+] {  now don’t press enter but just paste in your config lines and then } and ENTER. tclquit to exit tclsh. Now you’ll have your config snippet in flash:filename and you can use it to append to your config. Would be a good idea to check it with more flash:filename just to be sure that you have everything in place and no characters were left outside. As always, more info on Cisco’s webpage

So, it seems that finally Cisco decided to introduce a shell for their routers. I know this already exists for their FirePower plaform, but from my knowledge, they just made it available for routers.