Cisco IOS banners allow network administrators to display messages to users at login, serving both informational and security purposes. This content covers how to configure the Message of the Day, Login, and EXEC banners on a Cisco switch using global configuration mode.
Cisco Device Banners
These Cisco devices have a mechanism to relay information to others when they log in. They're called banners, and there's a few different kinds. We're going to take a look at the message of the day, the login and the exec, but there are others as well.
I'm on my switch right here and I'm in the global configuration mode, and I'm going to configure the first one, which is going to be the message of the day. So I'm going to type in banner, and then we're going to do the message of the day, or the motd.
And then I need to type out what it is that I want to display to the other person. It could be really lengthy, or it could be simple; there's a lot of different things that we could enter in there. We might want to have multiple lines in here, and so it needs to know what it is that it's going to accept, and so somehow we need to kind of quote what it is that we want to put out there.
They do it in a very unique way, and that is whatever character we type in first becomes our delimiter, becomes our quotation mark. If I were to type something like an e in there, that e then becomes our delimiter, that's the start of our message, and then once it sees the next e, that's the end of our message. If you can imagine, in our language we have a lot of e's, so e would probably not be a good letter to use, or a good character to use. So I'm going to choose a character that I probably won't use within my message, so I'm just going to use an 8. I'm going to type in an 8, and then when I'm done with my message then I'll type another eight to end my message.
So in this I am going to hit eight, I'm gonna hit a space, and then, just for the purpose of this, I'm gonna put in motd so we can identify that this is the message of the day and see where it shows up.
The message of the day is designed so that way you can relay certain information to people. For instance, maybe we say there's gonna be a switch maintenance, maintenance is scheduled for March 31st. And then we're going to end this. I'm going to actually hit enter, and then I'm going to end with 8, so there we go, that's the end of this message.
Next what I'm going to do is create another banner. We're going to just create all three and then see where these pop up. So I'm going to say banner, and this next one is going to be the login banner.
And I will type in, once again I'll use eight. Once again I will flag that this is the login by typing in login, that way we can identify it. And we'll type something like unauthorized access, and then we'll end this with eight.
So, some sort of message letting people know they shouldn't be entering this unless they're authorized to get into this device. That way if somebody were to stumble across it, like maybe somebody in the company were to stumble across it, they wouldn't think, oh, this is completely innocent. No, it says that you can't access this unless you're authorized. So then we hit enter with there, now we've got that one in there.
And then I'm going to do one more, and we're going to do exec. So I'm going to specify this just so we know that it's the exec message: authorized personnel. And then we'll hit another eight to end this, and then we've got that entered in there.
So next what we're going to do is log out of this and see where these pop up. So, exit, and exit again. Now we're back out, we're consoling into this, we hit enter, and we see the message of the day first thing, and then the login right after that, unauthorized access is prohibited. I'm going to type in my password to get in, and then we see the exec message, welcome authorized personnel only. So that's where it's going to show up.
Now it shows up a little different if you do something like SSH into it. So I'm going to create a new session here and I'm going to SSH into switch one. I'll open that up, log in, I log in as andrew, that is my account, and I've got my password here, so I'll put that in there. And now I'm in there. You'll see that right here, right at the top, it has my login, it says unauthorized access is prohibited. Once I've entered in my password, then it gives me the message of the day and the welcome, the exec message.
So those are messages that you can put on your device that way you can let other people know they're not supposed to be on this equipment. Or I've even seen some crazy graphics and stuff that they'll put in here, so you can do some kind of cool stuff with this as well as you're configuring your equipment.
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