Now for something different!

Cisco Command Aliases

Alias command allows you to define aliases for long commands. Alias command breaks down into three modes:

Alias Exec for Privileged Mode.
Alias Configure for Global Configuration Mode.
Alias Interface for Interface Configuration Mode.

Let say that you want to shorten Show Running-Configuration command to just two keystrokes, you could define it as follow:

Router(Config)# alias exec sr Show Running-config

Or if you want to use ns to perform No Shut command on an interface you could define it as:

Router(Config)# alias interface ns no shutdown

So now instead of typing out all those long commands you could type sr for show runn or ns for no shut down and still achieve the same desired effects.

Cisco IOS includes some built-in command aliases. You can view these aliases by using the "show alias" command. Here are the default command aliases:

• h - help
• lo - logout
• p - ping
• r - resume
• s - show
• u - undebug
• un - undebug
• w - where

The Alias Command reminds me of the .bat files back in the DOS days when we used it to combine multiple commands together and shorten the filename to just a few keystrokes. If used effectively, this could saving you a lot of time and typing.

Show Running-Configuration

One of the most commonly used command when troubleshooting a switch or router is the "Show Run" command. It gives you an insight into the currently running configuration.

Sometimes, this command yields so much output one would be overwhelm with the amount of text on the screen and have to keep pressing the space key to scroll down to see more information.

Well, if you know what you are looking for then you could add a command prefix " begin keyword" and it'll start showing the configuration from that where the keyword occurs.

SwitchA# Show runn | begin spanning-tree

In the example above, the switch will show the current configuration from the line where it finds the first occurrence of the word "spanning-tree".

Using this command can really save you all the trouble of spacing through all the text only to find that you go too fast and miss the relevant information and have to scroll back to look for it.

Funky Name

I had a little time to spare and wanted to have some fun to relieve the stress so I created a little application that generate some funky names based on the user's input.

The name generation logic is based on a children's book, Captain Underpants And the Perilous Plot Professor Poopypants, by Dave Pilkey, in which the evil Professor forces everyone to assume new names...

The program uses some simple one dimensional arrays and use the user's input to index into the arrays and generate the new name. It also makes use of the one click deployment option.

Pretty funny. Give it a try.

The program can be downloaded from http://www.meshflowers.com/FunkyNames/

Reading XML File Using XMLDocument Object

In the previous blog, I discussed how to read XML file using XMLTextReader object of the System.XML namespace. In the same namespace, we also have XMLDocument which can also be used to read XML files.

You can use the Load method to read an XML file and process the elements using XPath selection if you know the structure of the XML document as follow:

Dim myXmlDoc as New XmlDocument
Dim myNode as XmlNode
myXmlDoc.Load("Cars.xml")
myNode = myXmlDoc.SelectSingleNode("/car/honda")
myTextBox.Text = myNode.InnerXml & vbCrLf

The XmlNode object provides the NextSibling method which can be used to move to the next element or node.

myNode = myNode.NextSibling
myTextBox.Text &= myNode.InnerXml

Now that works fine if you know the the structure of the XML document. If you don't know the structure, you can navigate through the document using FirstChild and NextSibling methods.

myNode = myXmlDoc.FirstChild
While myNode.NodeType <> XmlNodeType.Element And Not myNode Is Nothing
myNode = myNode.NextSibling
End While
myTextBox.Text = myNode.InnerXml

This will dump everything in that node to the textbox including the element names and attributes.

It's not possible to cover all the methods and properties of the XMLDocument and XMLNode in a short blog, but I hope this will get you going.

Further reading should be done on the following topics: XMLDocument, XMLNode, XMLAttribute, FirstChild, HasChildNodes, InnerText, InnerXML...

Download the sample project here.

Reading XML File Using XMLTextReader

System.XML namespace provides us with the XMLTextReader class which we could use to read and process XML files.

The most commonly used attributes are .Name and .Value which returns information of about the elements and their associated information.

MoveToNextAttribute method is used to navigate to the next element. The project below uses an OpenFileDialog box to get the XML file which is then passed to XMLTextReader object and open it. Then the Read method is called to read in and processed the entire XML file and put its content into a textbox.

In my opinion, reading XML this way is rather confusing. I like reading XML file using XMLDocument object better as it’s very simple and gives you a much clearer view of the whole process.

This sample project can be downloaded here.

ListBox - Select Multiple Items

I've seen quite a number of forums posts asking how to get the selected items of a listbox when the listbox selection mode has been changed to allow for multiple items to be selected. It's actually pretty simple to do in .net.

What you need to do is to loop through the SelectedItems collection to get to the items that have been selected. The list box also has a property called SelectedIndices that you can use.

Download the zip file to see the sample code on this which also shows you how to add a name-value pair item like we used to do in VB6.

Using Meta Tags

Web pages are only useful if you have people accessing them. People only come to your site if they know how to get to it. If your site isn't well established then you need to depend on search engines to advertise your pages to the rest of the world. One way of doing that is through the use of Meta Tags.

Most web developers are too focused on creating the page content, they often overlook Meta Tags. Here, I'll discuss some of the commonly used Meta tags.

Description Meta tag describes what the page or site is about. The syntax for this is:

<Meta Name="Description" Content="Page description">

Keywords Meta tag contains the keywords that would be relevant to the page/site. For example:

<Meta Name="Keywords" Content="Web, Programming, Blog">

Description & Keywords often go hand in hand. You could apply this at the site level (all pages have the same descriptions & keywords) or at the page level (all pages have different descriptions and keywords). I’ll talk more about this in search engine ranking blog.

Author Meta contains the name of the person who published the page:

<Meta Name="Author" Content="Brian Dao">

Revisit-After Meta tag tells the web crawlers or spiders to revisit the page after certain period has passed.

<Meta Name="Revisit-After" Content="7 days">

Robots Meta tag can instruct the crawlers to index the page and whether to follow the links found on the site or not:

<Meta Name="Robots" Content="index, follow">

These are just a few things you can do to help published your webpages and get them indexed with the search engines and not optimizing your site for better ranking in search engine index as I'll talk about that in another blog.