cisco 831

[chipy]

who here has experience with this soho router. any complaints? i'm looking at buying this router to learn IOS. i know there are emulators out there but i'd like hands on experience in a "real world" setting.

i couldn't find any reviews of it on the internet so i don't know what it's pros and cons are. for example are there any annoyances with this particular product?

chipy

 

[cleverhandle]

I have an 837, which is quite similar. No real annoyances, except that it's awfully expensive for what you probably need it to. Well, that and the fact that my cat knocked it off my desk and broke it, but that's hardly the router's fault. As far as learning IOS goes, I think you're better off with an emulator (or, even better of course, real equipment) only because you really don't want to be breaking your own Internet connection while you're learning the ropes. And you'd be paying several hundred extra dollars for the privilege...

 

[chipy]

thanks for the reply cleverhandle! is learning IOS really that difficult?

chipy

 

[cleverhandle]

Originally posted by: chipy
is learning IOS really that difficult?

I'm probably not the person to ask, since I really only learned enough to get my 837 working. I found getting the PPPoE configuration correct to be somewhat challenging, mainly because there seemed to be a lot of conflicting documentation about it and the docs included with the unit don't go into IOS in any kind of detail (they just assume you'll use a Web Wizard or quick start program). IOS definitely isn't like anything else you've learned, so it's pretty unintuitive to start with. That's coming from somebody totally comfortable with Windows, Linux, and BSD and decently familiar with half a dozen different programming or scripting languages. IOS is really it's own thing. I guess people grok it eventually, but I never really got that far. Again, using an emulator for that purpose might help in that it would let you approach the topic in a (possibly) more logical fashion. Maybe PPPoE isn't the best thing to start with, but if it's your connection to the rest of the world you don't have much choice.

 

[chipy]

thanx again. i'll take your advice to heart.

 

[sonoma1993]

what is ios?

 

[spidey07]

Internetwork Operating System.

Basically it is the software that runs on Cisco devices performing the functions of routing and switching.

When people say they want to learn IOS, that normally just means knowing the command line interface used to configure and monitor a router/switch.

But if you really want to learn IOS, you have to go deeper and learn how it actually works from the operating system perspective. This way you can control performance and know what happens in hardware and what happens in the processor(s)

-edit- I hate to link to wiki for factual information, but this is actually pretty darn good.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cisco_IOS

And for a fun factoid, the "configuration file" that people associate with the configuration of the device isn't actually a text file as commonly believed. It is a binary structure and IOS just presents it to us in a human friendly set of commands. That is why on large routers/switches with 100s or more of interfaces or a complexe configuration it takes a little while to copy the configuration file or display it - IOS is taking the config file and putting it in a human readible format.

 

[chipy]

thanx spidey07!