Subtitles of the Movie

When you first take a look at the command line interface, it's just a text program and it seems like it's a lot less advanced as far as how you could use it than a graphical user interface. If I can't point and click on it, what good is it. But as you get to know the command line interface and its capabilities, then you start to appreciate what the Cisco command line interface is all about. One of these capabilities is its context sensitive help. If I don't know how to do something, but I am pretty close to being able to know how to do it, then the system can help me, as long as I know what direction to go. For example, if I wanted to go back to interface s-1, and then put in an IP address. Well, first of all I need to get into configuration mode. I need to know how to do that. If I don't know how to do that, then I am probably going to have a hard time finding that out of the context sensitive help. But then once I get in to the configuration mode, well what is it that you want to configure. Well I will press a question mark and see if I can get any advice, any hints from the system as to where I need to go next. So I am in configuration mode, and now I want to go in and start to configure something, so it says - "ok. Well here are your options. What do you want to configure?" You notice that one of my options is interface. And that that interface according to this context sensitive help, just by pressing the question mark, is select an interface to configure. Well, how about that? Well I press enter and I say, "ok I will type in interface". But, I still don't know where to go from there, so now I am going to do a space and then another question mark and say ok. "What do I do now?" And it says, "well what kind of interface do you want to configure?" You remember I said it was a serial one, so is serial one of my options? They're in the alphabetical order, oh yes it is. Ok well serial then. Ok now what do I do. Well let's press a space and then question mark again. It says well you've got four of them and they are labeled from 0 to 3. So which one of these do you want to configure. Ok well I want to configure 1, and then I press a space and then a question mark again, and it says the only option you have now is to press enter, or to press CR which is Carriage return, which is enter. So I am going to press enter and it says, ok fine. So now I am in interface configuration mode. Notice how I got there, and I did that from the context sensitive help. Now what do I want to do from interface configuration mode? Well what I want to do is I want to configure the IP address. So let's type a question mark and see if we get any hints here as far as what we want to do. IP, interface Internet protocol configuration: how about that? Interface Internet protocol configuration commands, so that looks like that could be a good way to go. So let's do that. So I hit enter a couple of times, come out here and type IP and then space and another question mark. Well what was it that I wanted to configure - IP address, oh! That means I am going to set the IP address of the interface. OK, how about that? So, I am going to type in address and then press space and a question mark. And it says - "OK. Now you need to put in an IP address and it says it's going to be a.b.c.d, OK, so put something in." So I say 1.1.1.1. and then press a space and then a question mark. because I don't know whether I was done or not. This is not done; you got to put in a sub net mask. So I am going to put in a sub net mask of 255.255.255.0 And then am I done? Well space, question mark. This is well, you could make a secondary address, if you wanted to, but you also have the option of a carriage return. So you could be done as well. In other words this is all I really needed. If you want a secondary address, then you should know about that but if you just want to set this address, then fine. So I press enter. So now did I set the IP address for serial1 to 1.1.1.1. Well, we'll look at show commands later on but let's just do a quick - show ip int brie. So, show IP interfaces brief, and we will see that serial one is now set to 1.1.1.1. And the thing is all I had to know to do was type conf t and then spaces and question marks. So that's the value of the context sensitive help. And as we get deeper and deeper into the commands that are available, the context sensitive helps becomes more and more of a valuable tool. So I would highly recommend that you just spend some time on the system learning about how to use the context sensitive help, much like just what we did. And another thing to look at while you are spending time on the system, would be the network management commands. So, we'll cover network management commands in our next chapter. t we did. And another thing to look at while you are spending time on the system, would be the network management commands. So, we'll cover network management commands in our next chapter.