System and Proﬁle Parameters

System and Profile Parameters

In addition to user-deﬁned proﬁles, there are three permanent proﬁles, Internal, LAN, and Standard. The Internal proﬁle stores parameters used to communicate between the LAN and WAN ports on the Cisco 700 series router. The LAN proﬁle stores parameters that conﬁgure the LAN port on the router. The Standard proﬁle is the default proﬁle. If authentication is not required and the destination device you are connecting to does not have a user-deﬁned proﬁle, the router uses the Standard proﬁle.

Proﬁles and Connections

Proﬁles are either active or inactive. An active proﬁle creates a virtual connection to the remote device associated with the proﬁle. A virtual connection is a connection without physical channels. After creating a virtual connection, an on-demand call can be made to the associated remote device to establish a physical connection.

A physical connection is a dynamically created pipeline of packets from the Cisco 700 series router to a switch on the WAN. All connections are associated with the proﬁle that deﬁnes the conﬁguration of the connection.

Virtual and physical connections behave similarly; the difference is that physical connections forward packets to the WAN. Virtual connections monitor packet trafﬁc on the LAN until a demand ﬁlter “sees” that a packet is destined for the WAN and initiates a call to the switch, opening the physical connection. Once the call is established, the virtual connection becomes an active physical connection, and the packets move through the pipeline.

The system is composed of both system mode parameters, user-deﬁned proﬁles, and permanent proﬁles. System mode parameters can be changed only in system mode. The prompt indicates you are in system mode by displaying nothing or the router name. An example of the prompt is shown below:

Router_name>

If you are in proﬁle mode, the proﬁle name appears on the prompt, separated from the system name by a colon (:). An example of the prompt is shown below:

Router_name:Profile>

2-2Cisco700 Series Router Configuration Guide