Restarting a Cisco Router

Although a Cisco router is by no means as temperamental as, lets just say, a windows computer, you may need to "reboot" it at some point in it's life.

This is not a huge task and could actually be used as a fail safe mechanism if you have entered in configuration that has wound up screwing up your router and it is no longer operating correctly. Performing a reload (Restart) without saving the configuration will essentially put the configuration back to the point where you last saved it. Hopefully right before you screwed up the config.

If technician feels that a restart of a cisco router is in need, follow these instructions. Please remember to save your config first!

Procedure:

1) Connect to the cisco router by first launching Hyper Terminal on a windows based PC on the same network as the router.

2) Create a new connection labeled Cisco.

3)Connect using TCP/IP, host address should be the internal IP of the router and the port is the default 23.

4)Click OK to connect to the router and enter the credentials when prompted.

5)Save the current RUNNING CONFIG to the STARTUP CONFIG so that any unsaved changes are not lost during the reboot process:

Router#wr mem

6)To restart or reboot a Cisco immediately:
Router#reload

7)To restart or reboot a Cisco in a certain number of minutes:
Router#reload in 5

Additional Comments

Extra Tip: Restart in N minutes is useful when you are afraid that the configuration changes you are about to make might break something or lock you out of the router. You tell the router to reload in a certain number of minutes, then make your changes. If it turns out your changes are catastrophic and you can't log back into the router to fix them, the router will reload in a few minutes and go back to its previous configuration.

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