Jim Explains the Various Interfaces and Modules for Cisco Routers. He Includes a Helpful Guide to a Document that Helps You Figure Out the Acceptable Modules for Your Router.
Hi, folks. I'm Jim. I'm one of the engineers here at CXtec and I want to talk to you today about Cisco routers. In particular, if you know anything about them, Cisco routers are very modular. They have all kinds of slots on them, little ones, big ones, that can take a literal blizzard of different kinds of modules. If you've ever had any trouble trying to figure out which modules are acceptable for the router you're trying to put them in, I've got some help for you.
Basically Cisco has a document that you can actually find by searching in Google. It's actually really easy. I'm just going to take you right to the Google search bar. Let's just say for example you want to look up some modules for a 2900 Series router. You would type in Cisco, then 2900, and then the phrase "relevant interfaces and modules." When you hit enter you'll find, voila, pretty much one of the very first links is interfaces and modules. If you click on it then you will come up with this really cool document that, like I was telling you before, there is an absolute blizzard of modules here, many many many choices.
That being said, here's how you'd end up using it. There's a couple of ways to do it. You can use the find function: at least on my computer it's control+F. In that search function, if you already know a piece of the module part number, like maybe you'd say it starts with HWIC, if you can do that it will run you through and show you all the different HWIC modules. Or if you want, up at the top here you can see there is various different subsections to the link itself, and in particular let's just take a shot at say we want to look for Ethernet modules that are routed port modules. They're module ports that are just like the ports on the router itself. Click on that.
When it goes it will take us to the section of the document that has the different routed port modules. You can see them all here. Here are the official Cisco part numbers. The little check marks actually show you which routers they're compatible with. The other thing that's really nice about it is off to the side here you actually have direct sublinks to the data sheets, and if there's a question and answer about it you can see they're right here.
For example, let's say I want to look at the EHWIC-1GE-SFP-CU. I can go to the data sheet and it will take me right to that data sheet, give you a nice picture of it, show you all kinds of things that maybe you never wanted to know about it, but some of the things you might want to know are its dimensions, maybe what version of IOS is required to be able to recognize the module, things like that. Then the actual part number and some other subparts for it that are compatibles for it.
That's basically what I want to show you today. I hope you find it useful. I know that I use it every single day and it gets me out of a world of trouble. Hope you have a good day.
