Interface Technical Training Blogs - Mike Storm - Pasting Large Cisco Device Configurations in One Step

Pasting Large Cisco Device Configurations in One Step

(republished from ciscoblog...JC)

If you've been working with Cisco devices for awhile, you know that the fastest way to backup your configuration is:

1. Do a "show run" command
2. Copy all the output to your clipboard
3. Paste it into notepad

Then, if you need to restore the configuration you just move into global configuration mode and paste all the output back in. Voila! Insta-configured Cisco device. Here's the problem...when you paste in larger configuration files, it fails. Somewhere after about 50-80 lines of config, the input begins to get scrambled and jumbled all around. The reason is the Cisco device cannot keep up with the data that you are entering. So...how do fix this? Slow down the input! Here's how:

All terminal programs have a setting called “Transmit delay msec/line” for the serial port. Here’s a view of what it looks like in Tera Term:

By default, this is some absurdly low value somewhere between 0-10 msec, which means your terminal program will just keep flooding the data and not give the receiving device enough pause to apply it. Adjust this value to something between 35-50 msec and your Cisco device will have no problem keeping up with the data.

-out