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Five ways Cisco Network Assistant 5.2 can make your life easier

I was a pure CLI guy for our Cisco devices. (73 buildings to manage)
I decided to impelement port-security. Naturally, your going to miss some machines, like printers go to sleep and don't show up on a scan, so later you have to figure out where the are, and what port to enable.

Using SiwtchInspector and CNA 5.2 This is an easy task. First as I locked a switch down, I scan the switch with Siwtchinspector and enter the computer or device name in the desc field of cna. Anything not used, I enter as 'unused'in the desc field. Later when someone calls with a amachine down (Locked out) I just use the filter option of CNA to filter on Ports = F*, and desc = 'unused' and then change the filtered ports to 'enable.' when my ping shows the machine now is responding, I run another scan with switch inspector, which tells me which port the ip is on, and then change the desc= computername, and apply, filter as above again, and then change all the ports whose desc=unused to disabled again. 5 minute job. CNA has provedn to make a somewhere difficult job much easier combined with switchinspector.
--Bruce D. Meyer

Thanks for bringing these tools to our attention. I would never have thought about using the CNA GUI. However, I had no idea that it had all these fantastic tools available. This is a perfect example of why we CLI only people should be more open minded.

Excelent article, one again! Keep up the good work.

This sounds like a great tool, but it doesn't appear to work with devices where TACACS+ or Radius Authentication are used.

good review.thanks

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David Davis, TechRepublic Author
Personal website: http://www.HappyRouter.com