asteiner@casbah.acns.nwu.edu (Albert Steiner) (10/25/90)
Just when our busy network is acting strangly, we use DEBUG RIP and find that our communication with the box grinds to a halt, eventually we get logged off--timed out. We can't get back in because we time out before we can enter passwords etc. Calling CISCO tells us this is a know "feature". DEBUG has a higher priority than almost anything. DEBUG should not be used on a busy production system. The problem is, thats when we want to see the incomming rip packets. I know Sniffers exist, but I would like to be able to quickly check the state of different networks from my desk. In particular DEBUG IP RIP has been very useful in other situations. I think CISCO should allow DEBUG in production, especially of the routing information. It is not enough to SHOW Routes, (although that is very useful). By default DEBUG should turn off after a short time (2 or 3 minutes) or after some limit such as buffer limits are hit, or after 500 lines of output or some such definable termination condition. DEBUG is especially useful for production environments, and a CISCO almost works, this kind of change would be exceedingly useful. Albert Steiner Northwestern University Evanston, IL Albert_Steiner@NWU.EDU
BILLW@mathom.cisco.com (WilliamChops Westfield) (10/28/90)
Calling CISCO tells us this is a know "feature". DEBUG has a higher
priority than almost anything. DEBUG should not be used on a busy
production system.
Actuallty, it is not debugging itself that has such high priority - it
is the output of this debugging information to the console terminal.
I think CISCO should allow DEBUG in production, especially of the
routing information. By default DEBUG should turn off after a short
time (2 or 3 minutes) or after some limit such as buffer limits are
hit, or after 500 lines of output or some such definable termination
condition.
There are a couple of things you can do within the current architecture
that do essentially what you are asking for. The key is to prevent the
debug output from being sent to the console. One way to do this is to
explicitly disable logging to the console ("no logging console" config
command), and instead pick up the output on a tcp vty with "terminal
monitor" turned on. The other way is to configure the system with the
"logging buffered" command, which saves the debugging output in a buffers,
and displays it when you do a "show logging" command.
Note that either of the methods may result in lost debugging messages,
which can be very confusing.
Bill Westfield
cisco Systems.
-------