Texas A&M Uses NetMRI
"NetMRI scores are helping me give feedback to the business people. It helps me justify what I'm spending money on because it gives them a visible score for the network, and I can be pretty confident that what it says about the network is true. Instead of...bits and bytes, I can talk about reliability, operator-caused errors, and I can give them additional functionality."
—Willis Marti, CISO
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Tech Tip: Router Running Configuration Not Saved
Why is this important?
Have you or a member of your team ever made a configuration change and didn't save it right away so you could let it run and make sure everything was working fine and then moved on to another task?
If so, you've likely seen one of the most frequent causes of network problems. It comes from the failure to remember to save your router configuration changes to permanent memory (write memory).
Companies are continuously trying to reduce overhead by keeping their support staff to a minimum. More than ever, the network support staff is multitasking and working extended hours trying to handle an increased workload. A simple mistake like forgetting to write your configuration changes to memory will cause additional work and problems downstream when the device is rebooted.
After a reboot, the router in question has lost connectivity on one of its interfaces and users are complaining. You might think that identifying the problem will be simple, right? But since you made the change, you wouldn't expect that to be causing the problem, so you focus on other possibilities.
The Manual Process
Looking for routers in your network that have configuration changes that have not been saved is a task that needs to be scheduled frequently in order to have any value. Ignoring the time/cost factor to the organization, how practical is it to expect an engineer to comb through the network manually looking for a potential problem when there are already existing problems that require attention?
We all have examined a router configuration looking for an error (misplaced period in an IP address, two digits transposed, etc). The problem was staring us right in the face and yet, after looking four of five times, it took a "fresh set of eyes" to point out the problem. Finding a config running but not saved can be even more difficult and time consuming.
The Automated Process
Manually diagnosing this problem inside your network is impractical. Time spent diagnosing network problems is time taken away from network improvement and expansion projects. One of the many features of the Netcordia NetMRI product is the ability to automatically monitor all of the router configuration files in your network.
It then proactively alerts you to the differences between running and stored configurations. In addition, the product provides change management support through the daily monitoring of configuration files. You receive complete detail of the running, saved and previously saved configs and you can schedule a job to fix this issue to reduce the risk of losing the preferred settings.