show interface

The 'show interface' command is going to display the statistics for a

network interface on the device.
Now, if you look at this specific interface, instead of all of the different
interfaces, you'd want to enter 'show interface', and then use the ethernet
interface you want to look at.
For example, "show interface ethernet 1/1".
This would display only the statistics for ethernet 1/1, that specific
interface in port on that switch or router.
Now, when you use the 'show interface' command,
you can see if the interface is up or down, if the line protocol is up or down
and some key statistics that'll help you determine if there's any network
issues.

First, you should look at whether the internet address is a valid address,
or do you have an APIPA address that was assigned because you had a
DHCP issue.
If you see an APIPA address, that means you need to investigate your
DHCP.
Second, you should look at the bandwidth and see if it matches your cable
type.
In this example, the bandwidth is set to 10,000 kilobits per second, or 10
megabits per second. This means the interface thinks it's using a CAT 3
cable.
Now, if this is incorrect and you're actually using a CAT 5 or CAT 6 cable,
that cable may be damaged,which is why the device is only reporting that
it's capable of 10 megabits per second.
Third, you want to look at your MTU size. By default, this is going to be set
to 1500 bytes, but if you're using a storage area network, you might want
to use jumbo frames
and use something as large as up to 9,000 bytes in size. This is going to
depend on what network you're looking at.
Also, you should check to see if there's any runs, giants, or errors in the
statistics,
as these are all indications of potential problems.
Finally, you should check for collisions. If you're running full duplex on a
switch or router, there should not be any collisions because each switch
port is its own collision domain.In this example, I see there are 432
collisions, which indicates there's an issue on this switch port, or maybe
somebody is connected to hubs that switch port downstream.

show config
Now 'show config' is a command that's used to display the current system
configuration to your screen.
When you use the 'show config' command, there are no options or
arguments.
It's just going to be entered as 'show config', and you'll hit enter.
Now for the exam, you do not need to understand each and every line
of this configuration.
If you move into being a network administrator and you decide to take
your Cisco certified network associate certification or CCNA, you're going
to be expected to know
each and every line of this. But for now, you should be able to read
through this configuration and identify some key areas.
First, we have the shared secrets that are being stored towards the
beginning of the configuration file, as well as some basic items that allow
us to configure things like our prompt and our message of the day.
Next we get into some system settings, such as the system baud rate,
which is currently set to 9,600 bits per second, when I'm communicating
over a console port.
Next, we have some SNMP settings, including enabling or disabling some
of the traps
for this device, so it can report back to an SNMP manager. In this case,
they're all disabled.
Next, we're going to have some IP settings such as those two interface I
have "sc0" and "sl0".
You can see the "sc0" is being set up to use a class B private IP of
172.16.25.142.
And a route was set to allow traffic out the gateway router at
172.16.1.201.
Now next we have our VMPS, which is the VLAN Management Policy
Server.
In this case, we have it set to a TFTP server at 1.1.1.1, and it is set to
enable.
Next, we have our DNS set up for this device, and this is set up to use two
DNS servers, a primary one at 198.92.30.32, and a backup at
171.69.2.132. Both of these are enabled,
and our DNS domain is cisco.com because this is a sample configuration
file
that was created for use by Cisco.
Next, we have our TACacs plus configuration, including servers, the
number of invalid attempts allowed and the timeout period.
After that, we have the configuration for an older protocol known as IPX.
And this device is set to allow IPX traffic to be bridged into this network.
Next, we have the VTP settings, which are going to allow us to be in server
mode.
Remember VTP is the VLAN Trunking Protocol. And this is a proprietary
protocol used by Cisco devices to exchange VLAN information.
After that, we have some spanning tree protocol settings specifically that
we have enabled STP leave a max age set at 20.
After that, we have CGMP, which is set to enable. Now, CGMP is not
something we've talked about before in this course, but this is a Cisco
specific thing.
CGMP is the Cisco Group Management Protocol, it's an older form of IGP
used by Cisco switches.
Next we have SYSLog. And in this case, it's set to enabled for the console
and it's set to disabled for the server. All the logging levels are set here as
well and you could see they're either two or five, anything above those
numbers would not be forwarded
or logged by SYSlog.
Now, after that, we have the NTP section, which configures our Network
Time Protocol server that we're going to use, including what time zone
we're in and if we're going to enable NTP clients or not.
After that, we have a permit list, which is essentially an ACL.
In this case, the permit list is set to disabled.
Finally, we have the first module in our device, a two port 100 base TX
device.
So this is a fast ethernet device. Here, you can see what has been enabled
and disabled
on this particular module or interface.
As I said, you don't need to be an expert on any of this.
I just wanted to show you what it looked like inside of a configuration file,
when you use the 'show config' command,
show route
The 'show route' command is going to be used to display the current state
of the routing table on the device.
More accurately, we're normally going to enter this command as show IP
route and hitting enter. This is because we normally want to see the
routes associated with IP based networks, for most of our networks.
Most of us aren't running any networks that aren't IP based. For example,
you're probably not running an IPX or AppleTalk network anymore.
Now here's an example of a router that I have that I've entered show IP
route on.
Here you can see,first we have a legend that shows us all the different
codes
and what they mean.

Then we see the gateway of last resort, which is our default gateway that
we're going to use, if we can't route traffic to any of the other routes that
are listed below.
As you look at those routes, you can see they're written in three columns.
The first column indicates how the route is going to be derived.
Is it from IGRP, RIP, OSPF, directly connected, a static route, EGP derived,
or BGP derived?
Then we have our second column and this tells us the type of route it is,
when we learn it through OSPF. In this example,
we have three of these types of routes and they're listed as E2, for OSPF,
external type 2 routes.
Then we have the address of the remote network, such as 150.150.0.0.
And then we see a pair of numbers inside some brackets. In this example,
it's 160/5. This means 160 is the administrative distance of the
information source and five is the metric for this route.
Next, we see the via and an IP address, which is the address of the next
router
to the remote network.
After that we see a time and this is the last time the route was updated.
It's written in hours, minutes and seconds. So this first route is only one
minute old.
Finally, we have the interface use for a specified network in this route.
In this case, ethernet 2 is designated as the path for sending traffic to this
particular network.
So, as you can see from this show IP route command that OSPF routes
have an administrative distance of 160 and a metric of only five.
The EGP routes have an administrative distance of 200 and a metric of
either 128 or 129.
This tells me that the router trusts the OSPS routes more than it trust the
EGP routes, right?
Now this makes sense if you think back to our previous discussions on
broader protocols, administrative distances and the believability of these
metrics.

All right, let's look one more time at the show IP route, but this time on a
different router.

Here, you could see a router that has fewer routes.

In this router. I only have four routes.
My default, route of one 60.89.0.0, and then three subnets.
Here, you can see the connected route is showing as possibly being down
on ethernet zero.
Next, we see two IGRP derive routes and they're using ISIS level 2 as the
route type.
These routes have a lower administrative distance than the OSPF an EGP
routes that we looked at earlier, but their metric is a bit higher than an
OSPF one
that we saw before.
Now, if you wanted to get additional details on any of these specific
routes,
you could enter show IP route and the IP address for that network
to get additional details,

including its routing metrics,

reliability,
the delay on the network,
and even the hop count as you can see here.

So in summary,you need to remember that

show interface -gives you the statistics for an interface

show config is used to display the current configuration on device

show route is going to be used to get information from the routes

learned by a particular network device.