Monday, December 08, 2008

Using MacWise with Cisco Routers

When you log into a Cisco Router with telnet, you may need to tell the router how many lines of data that the MacWise screen is set to.

The symptom is this:
When you list several pages of text to the screen, the listing should stop at each page and have -more- at the bottom of the screen. When you hit the space bar, it should show you the next page.

If instead, it just scrolls through the entire document without stopping, here is the solution:
At the Cisco Router prompt, enter the following:
terminal length 24
(that will tell the router that MacWise is set to a 24-line screen).

You can use Connection Scripts in MacWise to automatically send the terminal length command during login.

A NOTE ABOUT THE TAB KEY
Cisco routers use the tab key
MacWise versions prior to 14.2 had a problem with the program freezing with the tab key.
Pressing the "TAB" key (which in Cisco IOS automatically completes the CLI command) freezes the program and the interface
If MacWise appears to hang when you use the tab key, it is caused by a System keyboard preference in OS X preferences.
Here is the fix...
http://www.macwise.com/data/blog/2008/03/macwise-version-11-function-keys.html