Quick & Dirty: Cisco Modern Router (ISR, ASR) Software Upgrades

Hello World!

Just a quick post today, and my usual apology for not posting more frequently.

If, like me, you find yourself doing ISR IOS XE upgrades, you realize that although it can be a quick process there is always room for improvement.

Today, while upgrading 15+ ISR 4451 CUBE routers, I decided to quickly “notepad script” my upgrade commands. For reference I am using an SFTP server for this upgrade but the plan works for FTP or TFTP if you wish.

My quick and dirty notepad script looks like this…

copy sftp: bootflash:
IP ADDRESS OF SFTP SERVER
USERNAME for SFTP SERVER
REMOTE SOFTWARE-PATH
LOCAL SOFTWARE-PATH
PASSWORD for SFTP SERVER
! (for Enter)

A quick copy and paste and the process has started. Once the copy is successful, a second quick and dirty script will change the boot path and then reboot your router.

config t
boot system bootflash:IOSXEFileName
exit
wr mem
reload
y

There is nothing special here, and there are far more elegant solutions but this works for me and hopefully it can work for you!

Justin