Recently I have been doing quite a bit of labbing and one thing I have noticed is that there always seems to be repeatable elements such as the IP addressing, interface assignments. or if doing a BGP lab then the IGP configuration.
I find that doing this isn’t really adding any value to the lab I am trying to practice and just ends up wasting time – a fair amount of it – especially when typo’s are made – bear with me on my train of thought here – slightly convoluted however I will make my point eventually!
To solve this you have the solution of typing each base-lined config out and saving it directly to the flash. This way you could recall the config when you consoled on to the router, but how awesome would it be if we could automate the process somehow with minimal interaction. Well I give you………………the Cisco Router Menus!!!!!!! – Note that this only works on routers. Currently to date it doesn’t work on switches – not the ones I have looked at anyway.
Router Menu’s are an incredibly useful feature to have and has saved me so much time when doing labs. I have installed the menu system on start-up so as soon as you console on to the router you are presented with a menu that asks which initial configuration you want to load.
The menu system uses the ‘configure replace’ functionality of the router and I’ll go into that in a bit more detail a bit later.
To craft the menu system took quite some time. I started out doing a lot of the INE ATC labs – for those that have done these, you know there are a huge about of labs and for each lab you need a configuration – which results in a lot of configurations, and a lot of menu options. This gave me the initial idea for trying to create a suitable menu system. I then moved on to the thought ‘well what about future labs?’ Off the back of this, what i decided to do was create a more complex, hierarchical menu system that was future proofed (only to a point though). This allowed me to then build the menu system and assign place holders for configurations without actually having the configs saved on flash ready to use, making them more manageable. This also meant that I wouldn’t need to edit 10 (Routers) x 80 configurations just to add another menu item – as they would all need updating.
I have attached my configurations for you to have a look at and use if you find them useful.
