Useful commands to Cisco 3560/3650E

All commands will be resolved to their longer equivalents as long as they are unambiguous. E.g. show ru will be enough to execute show running-configuration, but show r would be amigous with show route and will fail.

Connect with SSH (see bottom of post if you’re running into “No matching key exchange method found”)

$ ssh admin@switch.domain.tld

The rest of the commands in this section are executed from within the Cisco SSH shell. $(conf) signifies that the shell is in configure mode.

Dump current configuration

$ show running-configuration

Enter configuration mode

$ conf t

When in configuration mode, a different subset of commands are available. To run commands normal commands when in this mode, prefix the command line with do. E.g. $(conf) do show vlan

Configure a SPI interface

$(conf) interface vlan777
$(conf-if) 

Configure a port

$(conf) interface GigabitEthernet 0/3
$(conf if) vlan 777
$(conf if) mode access

Configure an ipv6 route. This command will forward the whole /48 subnet to a single host at ::2121/64.

$(conf) ipv6 route 1234:5678:abcd::/48 1234:5678::2121

Pipe to a grep-like filter. The below command will print all running configuration lines which contains the string ipv6. (inc is short for include)

$(conf) do show run | inc ipv6

End configuration mode and go back to normal

$(conf) end
$

List files in file memory

$ dir

Open up a file for viewing. more is the default pager, but reads named files too

$ more config.txt

Save configuration to persistent memory (this is done outside of configuration mode)

$ write mem

Show interface configuration (int is short for interfaces)

$ show int

Show MAC address table

$ show mac address-table

Issues encountered

No matching key exchange method found

When attempting to connect using SSH, a key error occurs, preventing connection

$ ssh admin@switch.example.com
Unable to negotiate with 10.0.23.16 port 22: no matching key exchange method found. Their offer: diffie-hellman-group1-sha1

Excplicitly pass a deprecated option to ssh

$ ssh -o "KexAlgorithms diffie-hellman-group1-sha1" admin@switch.example.com
(cisco)$

No matching cipher found

When attempting to connect using SSH, a key error occurs, preventing connection

$ ssh admin@switch.example.com
Unable to negotiate with 10.0.23.16 port 22: no matching cipher found. Their offer: aes128-cbc,3des-cbc,aes192-cbc,aes256-cbc

Excplicitly pass a deprecated cipher from the list above to ssh

$ ssh -o "Ciphers aes128-cbc,3des-cbc,aes192-cbc,aes256-cbc" admin@switch.example.com
(cisco)$