As part of a promotion for this website and my CCNA exercises, I held a contest and giveaway when I first launched the site a month and a half or so ago. I gave away a few vRack sessions from IPexpert (that I had “sitting around”), a copy of Todd Lammle’s Cisco Certified Network Associate Study Guide (that I paid for myself), and a copy of uCertify’s Cisco CCNA Prep Kit (graciously donated by uCertify).

The promotion was mildly successful. A few hundred people learned about the website and several of them posted helpful advice. And, of course, let’s not forget the five people who walked away with something of not-insignificant value to help them in their certification studies — absolutely free!

Unfortunately, since that time I’ve been fairly tied up working on several projects and haven’t been able to devote as much time to Free CCNA Labs as I would have liked. I do have several “drafts” written up and am hopeful that I’ll be able to publish those soon.

The only stipulation I made on the winner of the “grand prize” was that he or she write an honest review of the product that would be posted here. Stuart Dyckhoff was the winner and has done just that. His review appears on his blog, churchTechy, and below:

A few weeks back – courtesy of Free CCNA Labs and uCertify — I won a competition which was a copy of uCertify’s prep tool for CCNA. The only pre-commitment I had to make was agree to write a blog post reviewing the product.

So let’s start off with their own words:

Passing exams required towards getting your CCNA certification is easy, using uCertify’s top rated test Prepkits. Here’s how:

• Full coverage of exam objectives (updated 2011) including Hardware, Security, Networking, and Operating Systems
• Practice questions that follow the exam pattern
• Comprehensive practice questions modeled on real world scenarios
• Detailed answer explanations for both correct and incorrect answer options
• Chapter by chapter study guide and study notes for exam 640-802, 640-816, and 640-822 not only helps you pass the exam, you actually learn the stuff you are supposed to know!
• Interactive Quizzes

They also state you get a years worth of updates for the price and one other ‘unique’ feature is the ability to ask / interact with other students and / or UCertify staff.

Whilst all this is laudable the reality is that the price is cheap and there is a probably a good reason for this.

Let me clarify by saying that the package could well help you become CCNA certified, but you’re going to need to put in some effort outside of this tool to do so. It is at best a dis-jointed affair that doesn’t guide one through from the basics to the end result. You have to navigate an interface that is not intuitive and doesn’t lead you — as I believe it should.

On top of this, the ‘extras’ I mentioned maybe of some value or not.

I couldn’t find anywhere that stated how often you get updates, just that you are entitled to a year of them. Secondly, in my usage I could see some questions from other users of the prep kit but nowhere did I see any answers from uCertify staff. If that’s to be the case, then they should just remove this feature.

One feature that does appear to work well is their exams and the method of tracking the results and what you need to brush up on. However, even this has a shortcoming in that it doesn’t have any simulation type questions which (it seems to me) are one of the biggest stumbling blocks most examinees face.

Ultimately I can’t recommend this product to anybody who is coming at the CCNA cold — and by that I mean with no knowledge or prior experience of the subject. If however, like me, you want to brush up on or take some tests because you need to re-sit the exam (as it’s changed out of all recognition in 3 years) then this may be worth the $150.

That’s got to be your call.

The winners of my first CCNA Giveaway contest have been drawn and notification e-mails have been sent out!

CCNA Prep Kit

The winner of the grand prize, the Cisco CCNA Prep Kit graciously donated by uCertify, is Stuart Dyckhoff. Stuart is currently working towards the Cisco CCNA certification, maintains a blog, and is also active on Twitter as @stubbyd. In the next month or so, Stuart will be writing up a review of the Prep Kit that will be posted here. In response to my e-mail letting him know that he won, Stuart wrote:

“That is AWESOME. A fabulous birthday present for me!”

I’ve passed along Stuart’s contact information to uCertify who will be sending him a license for the Prek Kit. Happy birthday, Stuart!

CCNA Study Guide

Jacob Hudmon was drawn as the next winner. Given the choice of one of two CCNA study guides, Jacob picked Todd Lammle’s Cisco Certified Network Associate Study Guide. I’ll get that ordered and on its way to Jacob in the next day or two.

vRack Sessions

In addition to the Prep Kit and Study Guide, I also gave away a total of five vRack sessions. Each of these is good for eight hours of time on one of Proctor Labs’ CCIE Routing & Switching racks, consisting of Cisco 2800 and 3800 routers and 3550 and 3560 Catalyst Switches.

“EOT” was the big winner of the vRack sessions, receiving three for a total of 24 hours of “hands on” time with the Cisco gear. Derek Newland and Chad were also winners, receiving one vRack session each. I’m sure they will come in handy!

Thoughts on the Contest

As you probably guessed, my goals with the contest were to draw some traffic to the new web site and help a few people out at the same time. I think I can safely say that both of those goals were achieved.

I had hoped to have more labs written up and posted by now, but I ended up spending a majority of this past week helping some friends and family members move residences and didn’t get to do as much as I wanted. Regardless, however, there are many more articles and lab exercises in the works.

Thanks to everyone who entered the contest. The whole thing went off quite well and I’m hopeful that we can do it again soon!

So far, we’ve discussed backing up configuration files, restoring them, and backing up the Cisco IOS software itself. This time, we’ll upgrade the Cisco IOS software on a router by building on what you’ve already learned.

NOTE: If you’d rather watch than read, check out the video at the bottom of this article.

Ways to Upgrade

In the good ol’ days, the only way to upgrade the IOS software was by using the Xmodem protocol — which is extremely slow — or TFTP. Newer versions of IOS now support upgrading using FTP, HTTP, and SCP, in addition to TFTP and Xmodem. Due to its simplicity, however, TFTP remains one of the most popular ways to perform IOS upgrades.

NOTE: Because it can sometimes take several hours to complete, upgrades using Xmodem are typically performed only as a last resort, such as when Bad Things™ happen.

In addition, since we’re talking about it here, you might assume that you could be asked about TFTP on the CCNA test.

Acquire the Cisco IOS Image

The first thing that we’ll need to do, obviously, is obtain the new Cisco IOS image that you wish to install on our device. You can download these images from the Cisco web site, assuming you have a valid service contract.

The Cisco 2610XM router that I’ll be upgrading today is currently running version 12.4(25b) of the IP Base featureset. I’m going to stick with the same version but upgrade to the Advanced Enterprise Services featureset. I’ve already downloaded the file and placed it in the correct directory on my TFTP server.

Check for Available Space

If you have existing IOS images currently stored in flash memory (and you should have at least one), you’ll want to make sure that you have enough free space for the image you plan to copy. The show flash command shows us how much total space is available and breaks it down into used and free space:

LASVEGAS# show flash

System flash directory:
File  Length   Name/status
  1   13660800  c2600-ipbasek9-mz.124-25b.bin
[13660864 bytes used, 36146492 available, 49807356 total]
49152K bytes of processor board System flash (Read/Write)

LASVEGAS#

As you can see here, we have one IOS image saved in flash and it is 13,660,800 bytes in size. We’re using a total of 13,660,800 out of 49,807,356 total bytes of available space in flash, leaving 36,146,492 bytes currently free.

The software image that I’m going to upgrade to, c2600-adventerprisek9-mz.124-25b.bin, is 29,957,284 bytes in size and, thus, will fit into the free space. IOS will ask if you’d like to erase the existing contents of flash during the upgrade process and, if you don’t have the required free space, you’ll need to do this.

I recommend keeping images in flash as long as you have the available space and, since the new one will fit, I’ll tell IOS not to delete the flash memory.

copy tftp flash

Now that we know we have adequate free space for the new image, we can begin the upgrade process. Once again, we’ll use the copy command to do this. This time, however, we’ll use “tftp” as the source and “flash” as the destination.

LASVEGAS# copy tftp flash
Address or name of remote host []? 192.0.2.235
Source filename []? c2600-adventerprisek9-mz.124-25b.bin
Destination filename [c2600-adventerprisek9-mz.124-25b.bin]?
Accessing tftp://192.0.2.235/c2600-adventerprisek9-mz.124-25b.bin...
Erase flash: before copying? [confirm] n
Loading c2600-adventerprisek9-mz.124-25b.bin from 192.0.2.235 (via FastEthernet0/0): !!!!
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
[OK - 29957824 bytes]

Verifying checksum... CCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCC OK (0x3C42)
29957824 bytes copied in 725.577 secs (41288 bytes/sec)

NOTE: Flash memory is sloooooooow. Even on a 100 Mbps Ethernet network, it still took just over 12 minutes for the 30 MB transfer to complete. This is because the image is written to flash memory in “chunks” as it is downloaded, which slows the whole process down tremendously.

Let’s quickly cover the various parameters seen above, in case they’re not intuitive:

• Remote host – Hostname of IP address of the TFTP server
• Source filename – The name of the IOS image on the TFTP server
• Destination filename – What the IOS image will be saved as in flash

The transfer was successful and we can see that both IOS images are now saved in the router’s flash memory:

LASVEGAS# show flash

System flash directory:
File  Length   Name/status
  1   13660800  c2600-ipbasek9-mz.124-25b.bin
  2   29957284  c2600-adventerprisek9-mz.124-25b.bin
[43618212 bytes used, 6189144 available, 49807356 total]
49152K bytes of processor board System flash (Read/Write)

LASVEGAS#

Select a Boot Image

When only one Cisco IOS software is present in a device’s flash memory, it will automatically be booted by default (and, thus, the following step isn’t necessary). When we have more than one, however, we should explicitly tell the router which image we want it to boot. This isn’t absolutely necessary, as the router will boot the first image that it finds but, unfortunately, that isn’t always the one that we want.

For this reason, it’s a good idea to let the router know which image we would like it to boot into the next time it reloads. We can do this by issuing the boot system command in global configuration mode. We can instruct the router to boot into the new image by passing two parameters to this command, “flash” (the location of the IOS image) and “c2600-adventerprisek9-mz.124-25b.bin” (the filename of the IOS image itself).

LASVEGAS# conf t
LASVEGAS(config)# boot system flash c2600-adventerprisek9-mz.124-25b.bin
LASVEGAS(config)#

NOTE: View your running configuration and make sure there aren’t any similar lines pointing at other IOS images. If there are, you’ll want to remove them using no boot system flash ....

Save and Reload

Save your configuration and let’s reload the router:

LASVEGAS(config)# end
LASVEGAS# copy run start
Destination filename [startup-config]?
Building configuration...
[OK]
LASVEGAS# reload
Proceed with reload? [confirm]

Verify New Image is Running

After the router has reloaded, we can verify that we are running the new IOS image by using one of the basic Cisco IOS commands you’ve already learned, show version:

LASVEGAS> enable
LASVEGAS# show version
Cisco IOS Software, C2600 Software (C2600-ADVENTERPRISEK9-M), Version 12.4(25b), RELEASE SOFTWARE (fc1)
Technical Support: http://www.cisco.com/techsupport
Copyright (c) 1986-2009 by Cisco Systems, Inc.
Compiled Wed 12-Aug-09 10:59 by prod_rel_team

ROM: System Bootstrap, Version 12.2(7r) [cmong 7r], RELEASE SOFTWARE (fc1)

LASVEGAS uptime is 1 minute
System returned to ROM by reload
System image file is "flash:c2600-adventerprisek9-mz.124-25b.bin"

...

We can see from the output that the router has booted the new image. The full range of features present in the Advanced Enterprise Services featureset are now available to us.

Summary

Knowing how to properly and successfully upgrade the IOS image on Cisco routers and switches is a basic skill required of all network engineers. Upgrades often need to be performed for various reasons, such as bug fixes, security updates, or to enable new features.

The upgrade process is straightforward and simple but you must pay attention to detail and ensure all the necessary steps are completed in the proper order. Otherwise, you might have to perform a recovery from ROMMON mode (which we’ll cover later) which isn’t very fun to do.

Video

The video below demonstrates the complete process of upgrading the Cisco IOS software, telling the router which IOS image you want to boot, and verifying that the upgrade was successful.

Now that you know how to back up IOS configuration files and restore them, it’s time to take a look at another task involving TFTP — backing up the IOS software itself.

Although in practice it’s not actually done very often, you’ll want to know how to back up the Cisco IOS software to a TFTP server. In reality, one often downloads the software from the Cisco web site and places it on a TFTP server instead of copying it from a router or switch to the TFTP server. Regardless, you should be aware of the process before you take the CCNA test.

Unfortunately, we can’t use Cisco IOU to demonstrate this so I’ll be utilizing a Cisco 2610XM router (which I’ve named “LASVEGAS”) from my home Cisco lab. Just like the last couple of articles, you’ll also need a TFTP server if you’re following along.

NOTE: If you don’t already have a TFTP server installed, check out An Introduction to TFTP, which includes a video showing how to install TFTPD32.

Luckily, the process of backing up the IOS software is nearly the same as backing up the configuration files. We’ll use the copy command just like we did before and, while the “source” of the copy will be different, the “destination” (TFTP server) will remain the same.

You may recall from Introduction to Cisco Devices and Cisco IOS that the IOS software is stored in “flash” while the configuration files are stored in NVRAM. We can view the contents of the flash memory by issuing the show flash: command:

LASVEGAS# show flash:

System flash directory:
File  Length   Name/status
  1   13660800  c2600-ipbasek9-mz.124-25b.bin
[13660864 bytes used, 36146492 available, 49807356 total]
49152K bytes of processor board System flash (Read/Write)

LASVEGAS#

There’s one file, “c2600-ipbasek9-mz.124-25b.bin”, currently stored in flash memory and it is 13,660,800 bytes in size. We can see that a total of 13,660,864 out of 49,807,356 bytes of flash are currently being used, leaving us with 36,146,492 bytes of available space in flash memory.

We’ll back up this Cisco IOS file, commonly called an image, to our TFTP server. I’ve configured the FastEthernet 0/0 interface on LASVEGAS with the IP address 192.0.2.83 and subnet mask 255.255.255.0. It is on the same network as the TFTP server, which has been assigned the IP address 192.0.2.235.

Use ping to verify connectivity between the router and TFTP server and then issue the copy flash: tftp: command in privileged exec mode to begin the backup process. The router will ask us a few questions and then begin copying the software image:

LASVEGAS# copy flash: ftp:
Source filename []? c2600-ipbasek9-mz.124-25b.bin
Address or name of remote host []? 192.0.2.235
Destination filename [c2600-ipbasek9-mz.124-25b.bin]?
.!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
13660800 bytes copied in 105.121 secs (129953 bytes/sec)
LASVEGAS#

At this point, the image has been successfully backed up to our TFTP server. If you view the files on your TFTP server, you should see that the image is now there:

Summary

Copying an IOS image to a TFTP server isn’t something you’ll do often, but it’s always a good idea to keep a backup copy of any images that you’re using… just in case. If a router fails and you have to replace it, you’ll usually want to install the same version of IOS software on the new one. Having that software image already downloaded and available on a TFTP server can save a lot of time when deploying the replacement hardware.

Next up, we’ll take a look at transferring images the other way — copying them from a TFTP to a device — when we upgrade the IOS software.

In previous articles, you learned how to install a TFTP server and how to back up IOS configuration files. Now, let’s assume that disaster has struck. The “disaster” could take several forms: an engineer fat fingered a command and screwed up the configuration, a hardware failure occurred, or perhaps a natural disaster took out our datacenter. Whatever the reason, we need to restore that configuration — and fast!

We’re using the same basic topology (shown above) as we did when we backed up the configuration. We’ll “simulate” a disaster by wiping out the startup-configuration on the PHOENIX router.

copy tftp startup

In the previous article, you learned that we use the copy startup tftp command to copy the startup-configuration to the TFTP server. We’ll use a variation of the copy command to restore (the syntax is always “copy <source> <destination>”) as well.

I’ve left my configurations in place from the previous article and, if you’re following along, you should too. We want the serial connection between PHOENIX and DALLAS to be up and active, so make sure that you can ping between the two devices:

PHOENIX# ping 192.168.12.2
Type escape sequence to abort.
Sending 5, 100-byte ICMP Echos to 192.168.12.2, timeout is 2 seconds:
!!!!!
Success rate is 100 percent (5/5), round-trip min/avg/max = 8/8/9 ms
PHOENIX#

For reference, let’s take a look at the output of show ip interface brief and show interfaces description on the PHOENIX router:

PHOENIX# show ip interface brief
Interface                  IP-Address      OK? Method Status                Protocol
Ethernet0/0                192.0.2.236     YES manual up                    up
Ethernet0/1                unassigned      YES NVRAM  administratively down down
Ethernet0/2                unassigned      YES NVRAM  administratively down down
Ethernet0/3                unassigned      YES NVRAM  administratively down down
Serial1/0                  unassigned      YES NVRAM  administratively down down
Serial1/1                  192.168.12.1    YES manual up                    up
Serial1/2                  unassigned      YES NVRAM  administratively down down
Serial1/3                  unassigned      YES NVRAM  administratively down down
PHOENIX# show interfaces description
Interface                      Status         Protocol Description
Et0/0                          up             up       CONNECTION TO PHYSICAL ETHERNET NETWORK
Et0/1                          admin down     down
Et0/2                          admin down     down
Et0/3                          admin down     down
Se1/0                          admin down     down
Se1/1                          up             up       CONNECTION TO DALLAS SERIAL 1/1
Se1/2                          admin down     down
Se1/3                          admin down     down

If you’re following along, your output should look similar.

Poof!

To simulate our disaster, go ahead and erase the startup configuration on the PHOENIX router and instruct it to reload.

While it’s reloading, if you glance at the console of the DALLAS router, you should see that the serial connection between the two routers has dropped:

*Sep 19 15:25:29.767: %LINEPROTO-5-UPDOWN: Line protocol on Interface Serial1/1, changed state to down

Due to our “disaster”, the DALLAS router is now disconnected from the rest of the network.

After the router has finished reloading, you should immediately notice that it has a blank configuration:

         --- System Configuration Dialog ---

Would you like to enter the initial configuration dialog? [yes/no]: no

In addition, you’ll notice that the prompt has reverted to the default:

Router>

Let’s compare the output of show ip interface brief and show interfaces description to what it was previously:

Router> enable
Router# show ip interface brief
Interface                  IP-Address      OK? Method Status                Protocol
Ethernet0/0                unassigned      YES NVRAM  administratively down down
Ethernet0/1                unassigned      YES NVRAM  administratively down down
Ethernet0/2                unassigned      YES NVRAM  administratively down down
Ethernet0/3                unassigned      YES NVRAM  administratively down down
Serial1/0                  unassigned      YES NVRAM  administratively down down
Serial1/1                  unassigned      YES NVRAM  administratively down down
Serial1/2                  unassigned      YES NVRAM  administratively down down
Serial1/3                  unassigned      YES NVRAM  administratively down down
Router# show interfaces description
Interface                      Status         Protocol Description
Et0/0                          admin down     down
Et0/1                          admin down     down
Et0/2                          admin down     down
Et0/3                          admin down     down
Se1/0                          admin down     down
Se1/1                          admin down     down
Se1/2                          admin down     down
Se1/3                          admin down     down
Router#

Yep, our configuration is gone and the network is down! Let’s restore the configuration file from the TFTP server and get the network up and running again.

First, we’ll need to manually configure an IP address on the Ethernet 0/0 interface that is used to connect to the TFTP server (using DHCP would also be a suitable option, assuming DHCP is available on your network):

Router# conf t
Enter configuration commands, one per line.  End with CNTL/Z.
Router(config)# interface ethernet 0/0
Router(config-if)# ip address 192.0.2.236 255.255.255.0
Router(config-if)# no shutdown
Router(config-if)#

You will (hopefully) see log entries showing that the Ethernet connection has come up.

*Sep 19 15:39:27.308: %LINK-3-UPDOWN: Interface Ethernet0/0, changed state to up
*Sep 19 15:39:28.312: %LINEPROTO-5-UPDOWN: Line protocol on Interface Ethernet0/0, changed state to up

Let’s use ping to verify that we can actually communicate with the TFTP server:

Router(config-if)# end
Router# ping 192.0.2.235
Type escape sequence to abort.
Sending 5, 100-byte ICMP Echos to 192.0.2.235, timeout is 2 seconds:
.!!!!
Success rate is 80 percent (4/5), round-trip min/avg/max = 1/18/69 ms
Router#

It looks like everything is working. We’re going to take the configuration file that we previously backed up to the TFTP server and copy it to our running-configuration:

Router# copy tftp running-config
Address or name of remote host []? 192.0.2.235
Source filename []? phoenix.cfg
Destination filename [running-config]?
Accessing tftp://192.0.2.235/phoenix.cfg...
Loading phoenix.cfg from 192.0.2.235 (via Ethernet0/0): !
[OK - 1409 bytes]

1409 bytes copied in 9.126 secs (154 bytes/sec)

PHOENIX#
*Sep 19 15:44:56.709: %SYS-5-CONFIG_I: Configured from tftp://192.0.2.235/phoenix.cfg by console
PHOENIX#

The configuration file was successfully copied and the changes applied to our running-configuration, as evidenced by the prompt:

PHOENIX#

It looks like we’re back in business. There’s an old saying, “Trust but verify”, so double check the configuration, make sure your connections are up, that you have connectivity between networks, etc. before declaring that the “disaster” has been resolved.

Summary

While the process of backing up and restoring IOS configuration files via TFTP is quite simple, you’ll want to make sure you have it mastered before taking the CCNA test. Other popular uses of TFTP include backing up Cisco IOS software and upgrading Cisco IOS, which we’ll look at in the next two articles.

In the previous article, you learned what TFTP is used for and how to install a TFTP server. While preparing for the CCNA test, you’ll use TFTP primarily for these purposes:

• Backing up and restoring IOS configuration files
• Backing up Cisco IOS software
• Upgrading IOS on routers and switches

There are a few other ways we can use TFTP as well (such as booting an IOS image from a TFTP server instead of flash after a Bad Thing™ happens), but in this article we’ll going to focus just on backing up our configuration files.

Why Back Up Configuration Files?

Have you ever lost an important file on your computer or had a hard drive crash? It can be either a minor inconvenience or a major catastrophe, depending on the data that was lost. Unfortunately, when — not if — a router or switch fails it can affect tens, hundreds, or potentially even thousands of users.

As a network engineer, your job is to keep the network up and running. When problems arise, getting things working again as quickly as possible is key.

Because files are important to the company, server administrations back up the data and files on the servers that they’re responsible for (otherwise, they won’t be server administrators for very long!). As network engineers, the configuration files on our routers and switches are quite possibly the most important pieces of data that we’re responsible for. We simply can’t afford not to have backups of them.

Even though they’re (usually) quite reliable, routers and switches do occasionally fail. At some point in your career, it will almost certainly happen to you. Other times, a simple mistake when changing the configuration may take the network down. When we have backups of our configurations, getting the network up and running again is much easier.

copy startup-config tftp

Back in Erasing and Saving Configurations on Cisco Devices, you learned how to save the running-configuration and make it your startup-configuration using the copy running-config startup-config command (or copy run start, for short).

Variations of the copy command are used to copy device configurations to a TFTP server, using either copy run tftp or copy start tftp. As you might guess, the former copies your running-configuration and the latter copies your startup-configuration. You’ll generally make your changes, save them (by copying the running-configuration to the startup-configuration) and then copy the startup-configuration to the TFTP server.

We need something useful to actually back up for this article and subsequent ones, so I’ve created a small two-router network based off of the Free CCNA Labs Topology. I’m using the PHOENIX and DALLAS routers, connected via their Serial 1/1 interfaces. In addition, PHOENIX’s Ethernet 0/0 interface is connected to a physical network where the TFTP server resides. Here’s what our topology looks like:

If you wish to follow along (which I encourage), here are the relevant parts of the configuration of the two routers:

PHOENIX:

!
interface Ethernet0/0
 description CONNECTION TO PHYSICAL ETHERNET NETWORK
 ip address 192.0.2.236 255.255.255.0
!
interface Serial1/1
 description CONNECTION TO DALLAS SERIAL 1/1
 ip address 192.168.12.1 255.255.255.252
!

DALLAS:

!
interface Serial1/1
 description CONNECTION TO PHOENIX SERIAL 1/1
 ip address 192.168.12.2 255.255.255.252
!

As you can see, this is the bare minimum configuration we need to facilitate the connections but it is sufficient to demonstrate the concept. Backing up the startup-configuration on PHOENIX to our TFTP server is actually quite simple.

First, let’s verify that we actually have connectivity between the router and the TFTP server. We’ll do this using the ping command, which you learned about in Using ping for Troubleshooting and Verification.

PHOENIX# ping 192.0.2.235
Type escape sequence to abort.
Sending 5, 100-byte ICMP Echos to 192.0.2.235, timeout is 2 seconds:
!!!!!
Success rate is 100 percent (5/5), round-trip min/avg/max = 1/4/16 ms
PHOENIX#

The pings were successful, indicating that we can communicate with the TFTP server. Once we know that we have connectivity we can proceed with backing up the startup-configuration:

PHOENIX# copy startup-config tftp
Address or name of remote host []? 192.0.2.235
Destination filename [phoenix-confg]? phoenix.cfg
!!
1282 bytes copied in 0.027 secs (47481 bytes/sec)

PHOENIX#

Upon issuing the copy startup-config tftp command, the router prompted me for the IP address of the TFTP server (the “remote host”) which is 192.0.2.235. Next, I was asked what I would like the file to be named when it is saved on the TFTP server. I could have simply pressed <ENTER> and the router would have used the filename “phoenix-confg” (you can see the default listed in the output above), but I chose to name it “phoenix.cfg”.

NOTE: Because you’ll often retain multiple backups of a device’s configuration over time, choosing meaningful names for the backup files is important.

If you view the files on your TFTP server, you would see that a file named “phoenix.cfg” now exists. If you open that file with a text editor (such as Notepad++), you’ll be able to view the configuration, such as in the screenshot below:

In addition, instead of having the router prompt us for the IP address and filename, we can simply tell the router what they are at the same time we issue the copy command (although we’ll still have to confirm them). We do this simply by passing the router a complete URL instead of just the tftp parameter.

Using the same IP address and filename as above, our URL would look like this:

tftp://192.0.2.235/phoenix.cfg

Summary

Since routers and switches do fail, having backups of their configurations is absolutely critical. In this article, you learned how to back up your configurations to a TFTP server. In the next few articles, we’ll look at restoring the IOS configuration file, backing up Cisco IOS software, and how to upgrade Cisco IOS on a router.

A while back, I had the idea for this site and finally got to work on it. The articles and lab exercises available now are only the beginning of what will eventually be the #1 site for lab exercises for those studying for the Cisco CCNA certification.

In the spirit of “kicking off” the site and because September is apparently “Shameless Promotion Month” (weird, huh?), I decided I’d give some things away and maybe draw a few people to the site. Hey, everybody loves free stuff, right!? Right.

Alright, Whatcha Got?

I know that’s what everybody wants to know, so I’ll skip right to it. Here’s the loot:

• One copy of uCertify’s Cisco CCNA Prep Kit
• The winner’s choice of one of two CCNA study guides
• A total of five (count ‘em, 5!) 8-hour vRack sessions on IPExpert’s CCIE racks

uCertify Cisco CCNA Prep Kit

uCertify was gracious enough to donate a copy of their Cisco CCNA Prep Kit which fully covers the CCNA exam objectives. It contains a total of 871 review questions and 376 quizzes in addition to practice tests, articles, how-to’s, flash cards, study notes, and more. It normally sells for $169.99 USD, but they’ve been awesome enough to agree to give away a copy to the winner. There is one little stipulation, but I’ll cover that in a minute.

CCNA Study Books

When making the decision which book to buy to help you prepare for the CCNA test, it usually comes down to either Wendell Odom’s CCNA Official Exam Certification Library or Todd Lammle’s Cisco Certified Network Associate Study Guide. The main purpose of Free CCNA Labs is to help newcomers to the world of networking pass the CCNA certification exam, so I’m going to give one lucky person whichever of the two books they want. I’ll order it from Amazon and have it sent directly to you. There’s one small catch here too (see below).

IPExpert vRack sessions

While the prep kit and study guide are aimed at those preparing for the CCNA, here’s something everyone can use and appreciate. I’m going to give away a total of five IPExpert Routing & Switching vRack sessions, split up among three winners.

Each vRack session is good for eight hours of time (well, seven hours and 45 minutes, for you pedants) on IPExpert’s CCIE racks, consisting of Cisco 2800 & 3800 Integrated Services Routers and Cisco Catalyst 3550 and 3560 switches. There’s plenty of Frame-Relay, Serial, Fast Ethernet, and Gigabit Ethernet connections to experiment and study pretty much anything you want!

Just one of these sessions would set you back $35 USD, but I have sessions left over so I’m giving some away. One lucky winner will receive three vRack sessions and two other lucky winners will receive one vRack session each. You don’t even need to be studying for the CCNA to use these. You could be a triple CCIE and still make good use of ‘em!

Okay, So What’s the Catch?

Alright, here’s the catch. Well, two of ‘em actually.

If you win the uCertify Cisco CCNA Prep Kit, you agree that within 30 days you will write up an honest review of the product and send it to me so that I can post it here. There’s no minimum length but it should be long enough to give others an in-depth review of the product. You can describe the product, the quality of the review questions and practice tests, and whether or not you believe it’s worth the purchase price (and why). That’s easy enough, right?

Next, the winner of the CCNA book must be in the United States or Canada. Remember, I’m paying for the book and the shipping out of my own pocket. I don’t know what it costs to send a book to the Middle East or South Africa but, honestly, I don’t really want to find out. I know that’s going to exclude a lot of people from winning and I apologize, but I have to draw the line somewhere. Sorry, maybe next time.

There are no restrictions regarding the IPExpert vRack Sessions. If your name comes up, you win.

How To Enter

Each participant can receive up to three entries.

Entry #1: At the time the giveaway ends, each person who is listed as a “fan” of the Free CCNA Labs Facebook Page (e.g. you have clicked the “Like” button) receives one entry.

Entry #2: You can receive an entry by leaving a comment below on this post. If you are currently studying for the CCNA, you should answer the question “What are you struggling with?”. If you’re just starting out this might be subnetting or IP addressing. If you’re nearing the date of your exam, it may one of a number of things: spanning tree protocol, EIGRP metrics, and so on. Just let me know (and be as detailed as possible, please).

If you’ve already earned the CCNA certification, your comment should include a “tip” or otherwise useful information for those who aren’t there yet. Just be sure not to break any NDAs.

Entry #3: Lastly, you can receive a third entry by placing a link to Free CCNA Labs on your own blog or web site. Once you do that, send me an e-mail (jeremy AT freeccnalabs DOT com) with the URL. If I draw your name and there’s a link on your web site, you win.

How I’ll Pick The Winners

The details on how to enter are below, but I thought I’d better go ahead and explain how I’ll pick the winners. At the time the giveaway ends which is, tentatively 12:00 noon (1600 UTC) on 30 September, I’ll begin tallying up the entries.

1. Everyone who is listed on the Facebook Page receives one entry.
2. Everyone who has posted a comment on this post (meeting the conditions stated above) receives one entry.
3. Everyone who has sent me an e-mail with the URL to their own web site which contains a link to Free CCNA Labs receives one entry.

I’ll begin at #1 and assign each entry a number which I’ll punch into a spreadsheet (or, more likely, a CSV file since that’s how I roll). Once that is done (sometime on the afternoon of the 30th), I’ll use the random number generator on random.org to generate winning numbers from the list I’ve created. Winners will be contacted either via Facebook or e-mail (depending on how they entered) and will have 48 hours to “claim their prize”.

The prizes will be given away in this order: uCertify Cisco CCNA Prep Kit, 3 vRack Sessions, CCNA Book, 1 vRack Session, 1 vRack Session.

If I drew your name and you respond within 48 hours, you win. Easy, huh? Winners who don’t claim their prize within 48 hours automatically forfeit and I’ll draw another winner.

If you win, I prefer that you would let me publish your name here on the site, but I won’t require it. I’ll ask you about it when I contact you to notify you that you’ve won.

That’s It!

That’s all there is to it. I think that’s easy enough. If something isn’t clear or there are any questions (though, really, there shouldn’t be), leave a comment below (and no, that doesn’t get you an entry!)

NOTE: Privacy stuff… As you probably know, I hate spam. As part of the contest, I’ll probably end up with a lot of your e-mail addresses. They won’t be given away or sold or anything else, with one exception: whomever wins the uCertify Cisco CCNA Prep Kit allows me to give his or her e-mail address to uCertify, who will send a license key via e-mail.

IMPORTANT!

One other thing… this is my giveaway. I made up these rules and I reserve the right to change them as I see fit. I can disqualify any entrants for any reason whatsoever or even cancel the whole thing if I feel like it. Of course, I wouldn’t do either without a damn good reason but I reserve that right. Just sayin’.

Now, let’s have some fun with this and give away some stuff.

Chances are, even if you haven’t used it, you’ve probably at least heard of FTP, the File Transfer Protocol. At one point, it was the protocol you used when you needed to get files from there to here or vice versa. Nowadays, we have e-mail systems that can handle attachments tens of megabytes in size and, of course, the World Wide Web. Because of that, FTP has decreased somewhat in popularity.

The Trivial File Transfer Protocol, or TFTP, is a simplified (“trivial”) version of FTP. One major difference between the two is that there is no authentication in the TFTP protocol. In addition, it is easier to perform unattended file transfers using TFTP, simplifying our lives.

What is TFTP Used For?

If you’ve ever paid attention to your computer’s boot-up process, you may have noticed an option to “network boot”. The Pre-boot Execution Environment (PXE) protocol uses TFTP to download the basic files that are needed to kick off the boot process. Popular imaging and installation software such as Norton Ghost, Remote Installation Services and Kickstart all use TFTP.

In addition, IP phones make extensive use of TFTP. When a Cisco IP phone is booted up, for example, it can download its configuration from a centralized TFTP server. It can also be instructed to automatically update itself to the latest version of firmware, making an administrator’s job much easier.

Why Do I Need to Know About TFTP?

One other popular use of TFTP — and the one you’ll be most concerned with — is for backing up configuration files from Cisco routers and switches. You wouldn’t dream of not backing up important documents and our device’s configuration files are just as important.

Unfortunately, Bad Things™ do sometimes happen. While Cisco hardware is generally quite reliable, routers and switches do occasionally fail. If you’re lucky, you’ll still be able to access the configuration. If you’re not, well, you’ll be glad you knew about TFTP. As long as you have backups of your configuration, you can replace the hardware and quickly restore the configuration onto the new device.

The other major use of TFTP is to upgrade the Cisco IOS software running on routers and switches. While you can go to Cisco’s web site, log in, find the software you need, and download it when you need to upgrade, doing that for every single device would get old real quick.

Instead, many organizations with more than a handful of devices make use of a centralized TFTP server. Because they often standardize on specific versions of the IOS software, they can store them on the TFTP server and have quick, easy access from anywhere on the network.

While (some) newer devices also support other protocols, such as FTP, HTTP, or SCP, TFTP remains the easiest method available. Because you could be asked to perform various tasks using TFTP on the CCNA test, you’ll want to be familiar with using it.

Which TFTP Server Should I Use?

If you do a Google search for TFTP servers, you’ll find many different options. I’ve chosen TFTPD32 because it also includes built-in DHCP, DNS, and SNTP servers. We can make use of that functionality for other lab exercises, so we might as well get it all right now in one package.

The SolarWinds TFTP Server is another excellent TFTP server that’s free to use. In addition, it has some features that TFTPD32 doesn’t, such as the ability to restrict access by IP address which is important in a production environment (there’s no authentication, remember?). If you were looking for a TFTP Server that you want to install on a server in your network so that it’s available 24/7, it’s probably a better choice than TFTPD32.

Because of it’s added functionality, I’ll be using TFTPD32 for the lab exercises here, although either will work just fine. Linux users also have a myriad of options available to them. Personally, I run atftpd (the “advanced TFTP server”) whenever possible. Packages are available for most popular Linux distributions via yum, apt-get, etc.

Installing a TFTP Server

Installing a TFTP server is generally a pretty painless process. You’ll be asked where you want to store your files (often referred to as the “TFTP root” directory). I recommend creating a new directory just for this purpose, such as C:\TFTP\, like I did in this video:

Summary

TFTP is a simple protocol that is extremely useful to a network engineer. In upcoming articles, you’ll learn how to back up Cisco configuration files, back up Cisco IOS, upgrade IOS to a new version, and even how to automatically back up your configurations when they change. You’ll need a TFTP server available to do that, obviously, so go ahead and pick one and get it installed.

Previously, we discussed using the ping command. Another useful utility in our toolbox is traceroute.

The traceroute command is another diagnostic tool, used for displaying the path that IP packets take through a network to the destination.

Like ping, the traceroute utility is built into Microsoft Windows (called “tracert”), Apple OS X, and Linux. It’s also available on Cisco routers and switches.

Assume that our network topology looked like this:

What should be obvious is that there is only one path available for packets to get from R1 to R4. If, on R1, we ran a traceroute to R4, the output would look similar to this:

R1# traceroute 172.16.34.4

Type escape sequence to abort.
Tracing the route to 172.16.34.4

  1 172.16.12.2 9 msec 9 msec 8 msec
  2 172.16.23.3 16 msec 17 msec 17 msec
  3 172.16.34.4 25 msec 25 msec *

If you match up the IP addresses shown in the output from traceroute to our topology diagram, you can see that the packets take the (only) path from R1 to R2 to R3 to R4.

Often, though, our networks aren’t this simple. Consider the network topology shown in the picture at the top of this article.

How might IP traffic get routed from Seattle to Tampa? Just from looking at the diagram, it’s impossible to know because, as you can see, there are several different paths that it could take. The traceroute command lets us know the exact path that the traffic is taking through the network.

NOTE: In the real world, security people like to block traffic that allows traceroute to function properly. In these cases, the line of output will simply read “* * *”.

Lab Exercise

• How Do We Get There From Here? (Coming Soon)

Summary

Although the traceroute command has several options that we can use, we’ve stuck to the basics for now. You’ll use this command extensively once you get into routing and then you’ll see just how useful it can be.

Objective

Configuring serial connections between routers for WAN connections is a basic task that you’ll need to be proficient at in order to pass the CCNA exam. In this exercise, you’ll demonstrate the ability to successfully configure a serial connection between two routers that are directly connected.

Topology

Two routers are connected back-to-back via Serial interfaces (the interface numbers may vary in your environment), as shown in the following diagram:

Task 1

Erase any existing startup configurations and reload the devices before proceeding.

Task 2

Set the hostname of the first router to “R1″.

Task 3

Configure R1′s Serial 0/0 interface with the IP address 172.16.12.1 and subnet mask 255.255.255.252.

Task 4

Configure R1 as a DCE device with a clock rate of 128000.

Task 5

Enable R1′s Serial 0/0 interface.

Task 6

Set the hostname of the second router to “R2″.

Task 7

Configure R2′s Serial 0/0 interface with the IP address 172.16.12.2 and subnet mask 255.255.255.252.

Task 8

Enable R2′s Serial 0/0 interface.

Task 9

Using the ping command on the R1 router, verify that you can ping the R2 router.

Task 10

Using the ping command on the R2 router, verify that you can ping the R1 router.