Cisco’s ASR1000 series of routers come in many form factors that all provide a number of different features, and options in terms of scalability. One thing common to all of the devices in this product line is that their IOS XE software that performs all of the standard routing operations for the platform is running on top of a Linux kernel. This post describes how to enter a linux shell on your router and run some basic linux commands to really get an idea of what your router has going on under the hood so to speak.

Do so at your own risk, as Cisco’s advises to only use this under their supervision of Cisco Support. This post is limited to viewing different things to get an idea of what is underlying on the system. It’s best to err on the side of caution and NOT do this on a production router, and be expecially careful to not edit/delete anything that’s vital as a mistake at this level of the router can cause major issues with any or all functions of the device.

With that being said, let’s dig in. For this demonstration I opened a shell into the RP, or the route processor of the router. The ASR1000 series routers consists of a chassis/slots/cards, which make up the physical Continue reading Logging into a Linux shell from a Cisco ASR1000 Series Router →