One of the many skills that you must demonstrate as a CCENT candidate is your ability to configure basic password security on a Cisco router or switch. This blog post walks you through the configurations you must have mastered in order to succeed in this area of the exam and the real world.

While I will demonstrate the configurations required on a Cisco router, keep in mind that they are going to be identical on the model of switch you are presented with in the exam.

First, we enter user mode on the router, and then enter global configuration mode to set our first password.

Press RETURN to get started!
 Router> enable
 Router# configure terminal
 Router(config)#

The first password we will set is the enable password. This is for backwards compatibility if you ever need to copy this configuration to a system that does not support password encryption. Note that this this is highly unlikely to happen 🙂 Since our router does support password encryption, note that you will never actually use this password on the device. Again, it is there for sheer backwards compatibility.

Router(config)# enable password S0ftBa11

Now that we have taken care of that, it is time to set the encrypted version of the enable password. It is the job of this password to protect Privileged mode on the device. Remember, Privileged mode allows us to make configuration changes to the device.

Router(config)# enable secret SanFr@n

Continue reading Cisco Router and Switch Password Protection →