Best Cisco IOS Trick Ever!!

Difficulty Level

So more than likely you’re not perfect and are going to make mistakes once in awhile. The most annoying mistake I can think of when making router changes is when you lock yourself out and you aren’t on-site. Maybe you changed an access list and have denied the IP you’re working from (or all IP’s) or maybe you made a change to IDS / IPS and have firewalled yourself. You need to power cycle that bastard and depending on the industry you work in, you might not want a local drone to go into the Computer room and start flipping switches. I work in IT for a major grocery retailer and we have a lot of great people, but I wouldn’t trust most of them to replace a USB mouse on a thin client. So what are your options?

1. Call local drone and pray they have access to the computer room and can power cycle the router for you.

2. Grab your keys and make an unexpected road trip.

3. Plan ahead and have the router reset itself, knowing you’re more than likely to fuck it up at some point.

Let’s go with option 3. Here’s how we do it

Router> enable
Router# Reload in MM (mm or hhh:mm)
Router# Reload at HH:MM (I’m hoping you are using an NTP server or have at some point made sure the time on your router is correct. This is important for so many things.)
Router# Reload Cancel (Whew… Everything went well. Time to “write mem” and “copy running-config startup-config” Time to go home, you did well today!)