Answers: Config Archive 1

This latest lab is actually pretty simple in terms of logic. The real trick is to get that first basic understanding of the archive feature in IOS, and then to remember the commands. Try for yourself first, and then come back here for answers.

Answers

Figure 1: Single Router Topology

Example 1: R1 Config

Commentary

Most of us have made mistakes during the configuration of a device, sometimes small and sometimes big. Fixing those mistakes on a single device, with only a single person managing it, might be reasonable. Now imagine the real world, particularly in a larger company where multiple people manage and configure different features on a single device. The configuration might be tens pages long if printed. Keeping an on-going record of how the configuration has been altered greatly affects how efficient troubleshooting can be going forward and can reduce the amount of time it takes to revert to a previously working configuration.

One of the tools that can be implemented to help in this situation is configuration archiving. With this feature an IOS device can be configured to automatically take a snapshot of the current configuration at specific intervals or manually, these files can then be stored either locally or to a remote server.

For this lab you were tasked with configuring configuration archiving with a specific set of parameters. The first task was to create a new directory in flash. In real networks, you would likely instead use an external server, but by using flash, you can actually do this lab without worrying about setting up an external server. To create the new directory while using VIRL use the mkdir flash:/csarchive command, or mkdir csarchive command. To check the directory, try commands like dir or show flash0: privileged EXEC commands.

The rest of the requirements focus on configuring the archive feature. To begin, you should move into configuration mode and then into archive configuration mode using archive global configuration command. Then, to configure to match the three requirements:

• Configure the path flash:/csarchive/ command to point to location to store the files.
• Configure the maximum number of files to store in that location with the maximum 3 This setting lets the network engineer keep a most-recent-N set of config files while avoiding using all available storage on the server.
• Configure the automatic archival of the configuration file on a time interval using the time-period 1 Note that in production a 1-minute interval would be ridiculously low, but it is useful for testing in lab.

Follow the steps listed in the lab to test your configuration if you have a router on which to test your configuration.