One of our engineers recently attended a two day Huawei fast-track course (designed for techs that already have at least a CCNA and to learn how to translate that knowledge to Huawei’s network OS) and he was impressed at how usable the Huawei network products are. The command line structure is different but similar enough to be picked up extremely quickly by those used to working with Cisco IOS (for example instead of using the command “show”, you use the command “display”). |
It also has some welcome extra features:
- Use of a notated subnet mask in most commands (e.g. type 24 instead of 255.255.255.0)
- A “display this” command which shows the current configuration of the interface/feature currently being configured
- "display" commands can be executed from anywhere, including inside an interface, without having to exit out of configuration mode, and without having to add a prefix to the command
The main difference between using Cisco IOS and Huawei CLI (besides the slightly different commands) is that Huawei uses only open standard protocols whereas Cisco uses a mixture of open and proprietary.
Cisco |
________ |
Huawei |
________ | Cisco | ________ | Huawei |
EXEC mode |
user view |
configuration mode | system view | |||
traceroute |
tracert |
end | return | |||
terminal length 0 |
screen-length 0 temporary |
snmp-server | snmp-agent | |||
show |
display |
hostname | sysname | |||
show version |
display version |
router bgp | bgp | |||
show history-command |
display history-command |
router ospf | ospf | |||
show interfaces |
display interface |
router rip | rip | |||
show ip interface |
display ip interface |
shutdown / no shutdown | shutdown / undo shutdown | |||
show ip route |
display ip routing-table |
|||||
show ip bgp |
display bgp routing-table |
|||||
show clock |
display clock |
|||||
show flash |
dir flash: |
|||||
show logging |
display logbuffer |
|||||
show snmp |
display snmp-agent statistics |
|||||
show users |
display users |
|||||
show tech-support |
display diagnostic-information |
|||||
write terminal, |
display current-configuration |
|||||
more nvram:startup-config, |
display saved-configuration |
|||||
write erase |
reset saved-configuration |
|||||
write memory, |
save |
|||||
clear |
reset |
|||||
clear counters |
reset counters interface |
|||||
clear interface |
reset counters interface |
|||||
clear access-list counters |
reset acl counter all |
|||||
no |
undo |
|||||
debug / no debug |
debugging / undo debugging |
|||||
reload |
reboot |
|||||
enable |
super |
|||||
disable |
super 0 |
|||||
erase |
delete |
|||||
exit |
quit |
|||||
configure terminal |
system-view |
Another nice feature for those that are studying, or want to test out the theory behind a configuration setup before executing in the real world, is the “eNSP” program. This program is like the Huawei version of GNS3, except that it contains the OS for Huawei products already, so it just works straight away (whereas GNS3 you have to find a Cisco IOS router image, decompress it and then also find a good “idle-PC value” so that it doesn’t use all of the system CPU). eNSP also has switches, WLAN controllers, access points, firewalls, hubs and a variety of client types including a multicast source.
And the best part…. it’s FREE for anyone to download right now for Huawei’s website!
Last but not least, software upgrades are free with Huawei - no support contract required.