Cisco 3660 pasting acl statements problem

[Richard Stanger]

I am in the process of switching over from a pair of Cisco 3660's to 3560's layer 3 switches and am 50% done in moving the 8 networks over in parallel.  Because of the parallel cutover, I am experiencing some challenges with routing and acl's but working through it.  Since the partial cutover, I have been having trouble with pasting the acl's into the older 3660's.  I end up having to paste the statements in 2 lines at a time, which is quite time consuming for a single 500 line acl.  Rebooting the router will allow the pasting process to work normally but later I have this same issue again. I work in a high availability environment.....little down-time is acceptable - ever. 

So, the problem is, pasting the acl into the router.  I know this is related to the partial cutover causing the issue (because the 3560 is having some timing issues as well on the vlans - port displays amber frequently) but could use some help getting through this acl problem first.  I only need another week to complete the cutover but need help now for the acl's.  The CPU and memory usage peaks at times but never frequent enough to cause this issue.  I believe it to be some type of buffer problem but haven't a clue how to correct this....help, please.

Rick

[Peter Paluch · Accepted solution]

Hello Richard,

Sorry for the late reply.

It is true that when pasting large portions of configuration into CLI over a console connection, some command may get lost because the router is not capable of processing so much input at once, thereby losing some information buffered in the console controller.

My personal advice is to put the large sections into a file, and copying that file into the running-config. Using the copy operation with the running-config as destination should cause the commands from the file to be added (merged) with the current running-config and because there is no buffering involved, the commands should not get lost or corrupted.

Your 3660 should allow you to copy the file from HTTP, TFTP or any other network source that is easily accessible. For example:

copy http://192.0.2.1/acl.txt running-config

should do the trick, assuming the file is located at the HTTP server 192.0.2.1 and its name is acl.txt. The file should contain simply the lines as you would paste them directly in the global configuration mode.

Best regards,

Peter