Chapter 18. Best Practices for Device Configuration

Having covered the details of what to look for in Cisco devices relating to MIB objects and show commands, we need to address a fundamental issue of network management: configuration. This chapter focuses on the recommended best practices as they apply to setting up Cisco devices for network management, such as SNMP, RMON, and syslogging. By “best practices,” we mean recommended ways to configure and maintain Cisco devices.

This chapter covers all the steps that are required and recommended to prepare your Cisco devices for the management strategies discussed in this book. We will identify eight best-practice configuration strategies in this chapter:

• Setting up Telnet access characteristics

• Setting up a Loopback interface

• Setting up NTP

• Setting up SNMP

• Setting up RMON

• Setting up logging

• Setting up CDP

• Setting up SPAN