Posted by The blogging Desk on Wed, Nov 03, 2010
- by Chad Weaver
Finally! I'm a little late to the party here but it turns out the SDM is dead. I can hear you saying, “What in the world is that?” “Who cares?!”
Well, I do for one. And as your friendly local Philadelphia area IT Support company, it's only going to be good news for you.
The SDM was the Cisco GUI tool for managing routers. It was also known as the security device manager. It will still be around for a while, but a couple months back the official EoL announcement was made. Why am I so happy? Even being a command line guy, sometimes using the GUI is a bit easier and for their other devices. I have never had an issue getting it up and running but that bad boy was always problems for me. Getting it loaded on the device seemed to take longer than any amount of time I used it for. There was also the fact that it seemed to have been written about 10 years ago and never updated again. So what are we using now?
The answer is they developed a new tool which is called the Cisco Configuration Professional, and can be downloaded from the Cisco website, provided you have a login. I recently took this tool for a spin and I like what I see. While remarkably similar to the tool it is replacing it was still easy to get setup, and get connected to a router quickly. I was viewing the configuration in a flash and all the interfaces were recognized! I can’t say the same for the old SDM.
I do have one small complaint; the install was 150 Mb. That seems a bit excessive for this but one install will hold you for all your routers so I can let that slide. Other than the install size and getting the IPs configured, it was a breeze checking out the new tool, so much so I decided to write about it. I know this isn’t exciting for everyone but for someone that truly loves Networking and IT support, it is almost the most exciting thing I have learned today!
Great! If you'd like some more information on how Trigon can help dig the hole for your SDM, give us a buzz. Or, if you have no idea what any of this blog even meant, give us a buzz, too!
