Why now?

CiscoLive EU 2015 (Milan) has sparked an interest in me for some things I’d never considered or which had seemed too much hassle for the rewards. However, working on a global QoS deployment and needing to make configuration less error prone is making me re-evaluate my stance.

These pages are here to document my findings, successes and failures. The fact that despite being able to find many examples of Smartports and some EEM, I’ve yet to find a single blog post that I’ve been able to follow without having to research why some commands aren’t working for me.

Basics

Some of the caveats I’ve come across, many are probably presumed common knowledge but they were either new to me or may be of use to you. I’ll do my best to list information sources as best as I can.

IOS shell

A good number of commands in blogs and tutorials don’t work because the IOS shell (IOS.sh) hasn’t been enabled. However heed this warning in this Cisco Support Forum article by mtimm.

When using EEM applet policies on devices that support IOS shell (IOS.sh), be careful when enabling shell processing full on the device as this can cause variables (i.e. strings that begin with ‘$’) to disappear from the running configuration

I’m not (yet) aware of any security risks to enabling IOS shell, but it’s best to be weary and likely the reason some Security departments may prevent us from using some of the techniques detailed in these pages. Please do leave a comment if you know of any vulnerabilities.