1.112 Cisco-Router

This page describes the device driver and the device window for Cisco routers. The driver works with Cisco 2500, 3640, 7513 routers. It provides some status/statistics polling via the console interface of the router. The driver reads the interface list and the BGP neighbor list at the router's console port, extracts some information from these lists and shows them to the operator as formatted tables. Polling is repeated as fast as the router replies.

Device window pages

The following table shows which device window pages are available with this individual device type. Tool-bar functions not mentioned here are described at the general description of device windows .

• --- Displays the list of interfaces installed at the router. For each interface it's state and some statistics is displayed. The device driver resets the error counters every 10 minutes to make the numbers comparable.
• --- Displays the BGP neighbour list for the router.
• --- This window provides an enlarged version of the low level command interface. The command/reply fields are the same as at the maintenance page, however the enlarged size makes it more comfortable to operate the router at it's console command line.
• --- The faults page.
• --- The device info page.
• --- The maintenance page. The configuration parameters described below are set at this page.

Configuration parameters

These are the driver configuration parameters of the Cisco-Router driver:

Hint for scrolling displays

The interface list and BGP list displays have been reported to appear with missing or wrong scaled scroll bars on some computers. Resizing the device window a small amount (drag the lower right corner with the mouse) remedies this flaw.

Event logging

Although the driver provides only one common fault flag for all interfaces, it monitors the up/down states and the threshold comparisons for each interface in particular. If the driver recognizes a change of one of these states, it sends a message to the event log. By this messages, you may evaluate at which time an interface of the router was OK or not. As this information is based on cyclic polling, it may happen that short time drop outs are not listed in the log.

Fault recognition

The driver summarizes the monitored interface states and generates one common fault flag from this. The 'General' fault flag is set if at least one interface

• is administrative 'UP' but operational 'DOWN' or
• shows more CRC faults than the threshold value set on the maintenance page or
• shows more interface resets than the threshold value set on the maintenance page or
• shows more carrier transitions than the threshold value set on the maintenance page.

Low level commanding

The router device driver provides an extended low level command interface. At the page you may enter commands for testing (e.g. ping or traceroute) or you may log in to change the router's configuration at the console prompt. When using this feature, you should consider the following:

• Commands are inserted into the normal polling cycle of the driver. Depending on the number of interfaces installed in the router, if may take a couple of seconds until the driver will have finished it's polling cycle. When the driver has sent the command to the router, three dots are shown in the reply field.
• The driver sends everything coming back from the router to the reply field. With the standard 2000 msec timeout set at the serial interface, the display gets updated every 2 seconds. You can watch the progress of a ping or traceroute command this way. The driver returns to it's normal operation after it recognizes the router name (the prompt) at the end of the reply.
• Never try to change the router's name with a low level command. The driver will not find the end of the reply to this command and will remain in this state until you restart the VLC / M&C system.
• You may interrupt a traceroute command by sending a "" (backslash) command while the traceroute is running.

Variables defined by this device driver