I’ve been working through the Juniper as a Second Language course online and I’ve been noticing a number of things that I really like about Junos as compared to Cisco. Currently my favorite feature if the commit option. As I was sitting here learning about it the first thing that came to mind was setting passwords and authentication options. I can’t tell you how many times I got my self locked out of a Cisco Router when I was writing my first AAA book back in 2003. With this feature I could have saved a ton of time. Lets take a look at how it works.
Verify Before You Commit
The first commit option is commit check which check the changes you’ve made without actually committing them.
Schedule Your Changes
Knowing that the changes have been checked I wouldn’t be as concerned with scheduling a commit. Thats what the commit at command does for me. As you can see here we have set the change to commit at 11pm, right inside my maintenance window.
My Favorite Commit Command and a Little Protection…
The command commit confirmed is without a doubt my favorite command. Basically if you just enter commit confirmed you will be committing the change, but only for 10 minutes unless you enter the commit command a second time. If you want to be more specific you can shorten the time before the rollback. This is where I could have really benefitted during the writing of my book. Had I configured the commit confirmed command and locked myself out with a change to authentication the OS would have rolled back for me, giving me back my access without the need for a password recovery. What a great feature!
Wrap-up
I’m sure there will be many more configuration elements that I fall in love with while using Junos. As I come across them I’ll be sure to share. them. Until then, it’s back to the books!
I don’t have much experience with Juniper, but from what I’ve seen and have heard through the grape vines it’s a quite wonderful technology. And a commit rollback compared to a ‘reload in’ command is far superior! shouldn’t have to reboot a router because of a miss typed command!
Love the blog keep it up!
Here’s a couple of commands that I find helpful:
Edit mode:
commit check – The system will let you know of potential problems with your configuration
commit comment “Text that will describe what you’re doing” – This will attach a description to the changes that you’re making
Operational mode:
show system commit – This will list the configurations with your comments. This is especially helpful if you have radius / tacacs / ldap setup as a user name will be appended to the configuration.
show system rollback compare # # – This will show the differences between two previous configurations.
I follow this blog in Google Reader; thanks for your hard work! Hope some of these Junos tips help!
-Mike