NX-OS, mildly interesting yet helpful

Over the past 3 months I’ve been working with Nexus NX-OS 9.3.(x) and learned an interesting command.

The command is show cli history. ¹

Here is an example of work that was needed on two N9k switches.

inte eth 1/1, eth1/4, eth1/7 
(do work) 
 
 show cli history unformatted 
    conf t 
        inte eth 1/1 
        exit 
        inte eth 1/1, eth1/4, eth1/7 
            switchport mode trunk  
            no switchport acc vlan 

It is mildly interesting, yet helpful. Copy and paste the repeated commands.

conf t 
    inte eth 1/1 
    exit 
    inte eth 1/1, eth1/4, eth1/7 
        switchport mode trunk  
        no switchport acc vlan 

PowerOn Auto Provisioning (POAP)

NX-OS provides out of the box tooling that is very appealing. I have not yet tested POAP.

However, POAP reminded me of past work I’d performed using Preboot execution environment (PXE)² with bare metal x86 servers, and using ONIE (Open Network Install Environment)³ for ONIE compatible hardware switches.

What is annoying

If you are used to traditional IOS or IOS-XE then it is likely you have made use of the command write to save the running-config. In fact, for me it is a habit to type write when I want to save a Cisco config. With NX-OS there is no command named write. Out of the box you only have the command copy running-config startup-config. Wut?

The way around this is to create an alias.

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Footnotes and Sources

1. Documentation for this command is found here, https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/switches/datacenter/nexus9000/sw/93x/fundamentals/configuration/guide/b-cisco-nexus-9000-nx-os-fundamentals-configuration-guide-93x/b-cisco-nexus-9000-nx-os-fundamentals-configuration-guide-93x_chapter_0110.html#task_A7160D8D14AD49CAA22E93716E3A6731[↩]
2. This reference describes the specification https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-henry-remote-boot-protocol-00[↩]
3. https://opencomputeproject.github.io/onie/[↩]

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