The most secure way to access your Cisco switch

I recently purchased a Cisco SG300-10 switch for my home networking lab and have been very pleased with it so far. It has a ton of features, most of which I will probably never use in my home environment. However, for a small business, it gives you a lot of control over your network.

There are currently two ways to manage Cisco switches: from the web-based GUI interface or from the terminal-based command line interface. I have found that the web-based GUI is not nearly as stable as the Cisco IOS available via the CLI. On several occasions, after attempting to save a configuration change to the GUI, the entire switch would crash and I would have to reboot it to regain access to the GUI.

However, if you are going to use the CLI, you will first need to enable SSH access on the switch. In this article, I will discuss how to enable the SSH service and log in with the username and password stored in the local database.