Cisco Guru? omg advise plz!!

PirateJon

I'm doing more and more heavy networking in my job and could use some recommendations on the following.

Replacement telnet program. The windows one is a bit plain. Macros would be nice.

Something to read in the head - a Cisco equivalent of "technet" magazine or "windows it pro" magazine. I liked network magazine before they rolled it into network computing. NC is a bit too press-release-ish for me.

A quality guide to ciscoworks. The help and documentation seems a bit spastic.


Also any books, sites, programs that made your job easier or are cool would also be neat. Thanx in advance.

twmjr

For a replacement telnet/SSH program take a look at PuTTY. I can't remember off the top of my head whether or not it supports macros, but either way it's a fair bit nicer than the standard Windows telnet program.

As far as websites, Cisco's own website is actually pretty helpful when you're looking for a specific solution. Unfortunately, from what I remember, their own search mechanism sucks -- however, using Google and looking for the relevant cisco.com results should work for you.

vonPoonBurGer

We use CRT as the standard telnet app for our remote support department, and a separate app by a company called Pragma Systems for SSH/SFTP. Personally though, I just use PuTTY for telnet and SSH, and FileZilla for FTP and SFTP; both of those are open-source / free, by the way.

I'm not familiar with any IT rags that specifically cover Cisco or networking, personally.

As for help and documentation, Cisco's documentation tends to be kind of spotty in places. I've found that the online help in most of their systems is good for basic info, but the configuration examples on their website are far more useful when trying to accomplish something new. If all else fails, googling the error message will usually get you message board threads from other users who've experienced the same problem.

Do you have a Cisco support contract? Cisco's phone and email support is actually quite decent from what I've found. If you've got a significant amount of Cisco gear, you really ought to cover yourselves with a Cisco support contract. Pitch it to management as a cost that actually saves you money by reducing expensive downtime.