Rest in Peace to the command line

I work on cisco equipments that means I work alot on the command line, now I have abandon the command line for SDM. Plus Linuxists are not left , every one is moving to the GUI I will miss the command line.

That's interesting. I completed CCNA v3.1 this year and, whilst the tutor ran v4 in parallel with the few of us who were completing v3.1, she and the technical guy who works with her said that they prefer the command line method of entering configurations. I've also seen comments on several fora which indicate that the GUI isn't very comprehensive when it comes to entering complicated configs. If this is true and Cisco want to abandon the CLI in favour of SDM, I suspect that they will have to improve the GUI.

I guess that I'm an old fashioned sort of fellow. Just think - how many top level netadmins can get by without an intimate knowledge of Windows cmd.exe commands? I know that use of such commands is often employed to confuse (and impress!) end-users who happen to watch what an engineer is doing at their workstation but I firmly believe that such command-line techniques (Cisco, Windows or Linux) are vitally important to network administrators.

I agree Steve. SDM typically lags CLI by at least 12 months when it comes to features, and SDM is slow and clumsy. CLI offers the ability to automate many tasks ... try doing that on SDM. While I do believe SDM may have its place for certain tasks (very few) ... CLI is a Net Eng true friend.

There's stuff you can do at the Cisco IOS command line that you can't do in a device GUI or even through something like Cisco Works. And in Windows the command line is still king when you want to do repeated tasks or deep digging

very true Bishop, normally the issues which NetEng face require deep digging and that can be quite uncomfortabe with SDM.

have you guys tried doing some advance firewall config on cisco router, then you will see the advantage of the SDM. In the real life production world I can get by with SDM at least for all the configs I need. I am very much aware of the flexibility of the command line