problems with copy paste config

[peter-net]

Basic I know but is driving me mad. Am writing configs in notepad then copy/pasting to new swicthes - after about 1/2 the config copies in (sucessfully) - I start to lose data in the copy process - is this to do with memory buffers somewhere ? (Dont tell me to tftp - thanks)

[Sarbjit-2014]

Hi,

I find Teraterm works a treat for your type of scenerio, These are the settings I use from the Terminal window:

Setup - Window - Scroll buffer 10000.

Setup - Serial port setup - Transmit delay 1msec/char.

[Richard Burts]

Ahmed

If copy/paste from SecureCRT was working fine and then it became a problem then what I make of it is that something changed. It might have been a change in the connection to the device which allowed a greater amount of traffic, it might have been some change in the device which slowed down its ability to receive and execute the config commands, it might have been a change in the PC which allowed faster transmission for this connection, it might have been the result of some software upgrade, it might have been the result in changing settings in SecureCRT, it might have been that previously you were working with relatively smaller config changes (in which buffering was not as critical) and now are working with larger config changes (in which buffering does become critical). We do not have enough information to assesss what changed, but I am certain that something changed.

You can describe it as the emulator went buggy and perhaps from your perspective that is an accurate assessment. From my perspective encountering a situation where the sending device has greater capacity than the receiving device does not mean that the emulator is flawed.

Sarbjit-2014

Teraterm is a fine emulator but it would be quite similar to SecureCRT in that you need to configure settings to control the speed at which you transmit (which is what you tell us that you did) and if Teraterm send data at full capacity then it would be likely to have the same mismatch issues that SecureCRT has.

HTH

Rick

[Leo Laohoo]

Am writing configs in notepad then copy/pasting to new swicthes

This is "old school" method.  

Let me ask you the following questions ... How many minutes does it take you to build a switch?    (When I mean "build", I mean configure the switch and upgrade/downgrade the IOS to the standard of your network.)  How many minutes will it then take you to build a brand new pile of, say, 20 switches? 

What if I can tell you it'll take, an average, about 20 minutes to "build" just one switch.  Now, what if I say that I can build a pile of 20 switches in 20 minutes.  Here's the icing ... What if I say "I can build a brand new pile of 20 switches in 20 minutes ... without even touching the keyboard".    Are you still interested?

[Richard Burts]

Leo

Welcome to the conversation :)

Yes that approach is "old school" and the post that mentions it is 6 years old. But please do enlighten us about how you would build a new pile of 20 switches "without touching the keyboard".

HTH

Rick

[Leo Laohoo]

Yes that approach is "old school" and the post that mentions it is 6 years old. 

Gawk!  I didn't see the "age".  :(

But please do enlighten us about how you would build a new pile of 20 switches "without touching the keyboard".

Since 12.2(55)SE2 and later, Cisco has introduced a feature called Zero-Touch SmartInstall.  You plug an ethernet cable to your new switch (no config).  The SmartInstall "director" will identify the model of the switch via CDP and, if the switch model is in the "list", the "director" will push the config to the new switch's startup-config and, optionally, upgrade the switch IOS.  All complete in 20 minutes.  

There's a reason why it's called Zero-Touch:  Hit any keys (except the Shift key, of course) on the keyboard and the process stops.  

I've been using (still using until now) this since 2011 and we haven't looked back.  As a matter of fact, we can't take it out anymore because it's an integral part of our tools.

Read this:  How to use Zero-Touch SmartInstall

[Vidyasagar Venkatesh Kumar]

Teraterm works magic :)

[jlehman01]

Any suggestions? Increase the Line send delay above 5 or lower it? The default emulator in SecureCRT seems to be VT100 but Putty is xterm. Could that be the issue. 

I've experienced this truncating / random line missing issue twice now. Both caused major problems on our network as we save ACLs in a txt doc and then copy them into the switches. When i copied the ACL in it has an "end" and "exit" so it kicks me out of the switch and that did happen so i thought the ACL copied all the way. I've had issues where it flat out stops copying halfway and the solution is to just do smaller junks of data, and thats not a big issue. The issue is that i have to copy the ACLs from the switch back into notepad++ and figure out which lines are missing from the correct ACL. And these are lines that i didn't touch / are old so its not syntax or something like that related. Random lines of the ACL disappear. We used to have a GLBP setup (now using VSS) but have some distributions running GLBP still so i have to copy the ACL to both switches. I've seen one switch be fine and the other missing random lines. 

 

[Richard Burts]

The problem is not related to emulating VT100 or xterm or anything like that. The problem is that the PC is capable of sending text faster than the network device (router or switch or whatever) is capable of processing it.  With smaller amounts of text to send the network device is usually capable of buffering and processing the changes. But as the amount of text increases you get to a point where some of the text is dropped. This would explain why it seems to be random lines and that the exit/end command at the end of the file would be processed while some lines in the middle might be dropped.

If the same set of commands were processed without problem on one switch and had problems in another switch then I would guess that either there is some difference in processing capability between the switches, or that one switch was able to dedicate all its processing capability to your config changes, while the other switch had some processing requirements for other tasks during your config change and could not dedicate all of its processing resources to your config changes.

The answer is to slow down the rate at which you send the text. Increase the line delay will help or solve the problem. Lowering the line delay would make the problem worse.

HTH

Rick

[Nadav]

The easiest solution I've found for this is using Rutty (Putty with a few additional features for scripting).

Rutty allows pasting text files with fixed inter-character delays and fixed inter-line delays. Thus you can take a massive configuration, configure the line delay to be 200ms (or however much you find necessary), and then paste the configuration.

As far as I can tell, no other free TTY software supports this feature.

[SKW]

Try "terminal length 0"on the switch. Providing the config is clean (free of errors) you should be able to paste your config using putty no problems. To revert back terminal length 25. HTH.