Preventing Typos

[lee.cox01]

Hi all

We recently had an incident where a Live system was brought down due to an engineer typing an IP address incorrectly. Whereas he meant to write x.x.x.50 he put x.x.x.51.

Does the community have a quick easy way of preventing these types of issues?

Many Thanks

[John Blakley · Accepted solution]

Peer review is the best option. If you're concerns lie around engineers making human errors, then the best bet would be to have someone watch over the shoulder when a major change is being made. Unfortunately, there's nothing in Cisco that will warn of a typo as long as it's a valid command. Otherwise, it will warn that the command may cause instability in a network (in the case of debug ip packet) or that an address overlaps (in the case of putting an address on two different interfaces that are in the same network).

HTH,

John

[Joseph W. Doherty]

Disclaimer

The Author of this posting offers the information contained within this posting without consideration and with the reader's understanding that there's no implied or expressed suitability or fitness for any purpose. Information provided is for informational purposes only and should not be construed as rendering professional advice of any kind. Usage of this posting's information is solely at reader's own risk.

Liability Disclaimer

In no event shall Author be liable for any damages whatsoever (including, without limitation, damages for loss of use, data or profit) arising out of the use or inability to use the posting's information even if Author has been advised of the possibility of such damage.

Posting

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/measure_twice_and_cut_once

[Jon Marshall]

I agree with John and Joe.

There are mechanisms such as scheduling a reload of the device, making changes and if you get cut off then the device reloads to previous configuration (as long as you didn't save the configuration).

And IOS XR supports commit and rollback.

But obviously no device can know what IP was meant to be configured.

In this case peer review, as John says, is pretty much the only way to ensure there are no errors.

But mistakes do happen, just the way it is.

Jon