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Cisco IE 2000 Switch Software Configuration Guide
OL-25866-01
Chapter 7 Performing Switch Administration
Information About Performing Switch Administration
Improved security compared to NTPv3. The NTPv4 protocol provides a security framework based
on public key cryptography and standard X509 certificates.
Automatic calculation of the time-distribution hierarchy for a network. Using specific multicast
groups, NTPv4 automatically configures the hierarchy of the servers to achieve the best time
accuracy for the lowest bandwidth cost. This feature leverages site-local IPv6 multicast addresses.
For details about configuring NTPv4, see the Cisco IOS IPv6 Configuration Guide on Cisco.com.
DNS
The DNS protocol controls the Domain Name System (DNS), a distributed da tabase with which you can
map hostnames to IP addresses. When you configure DNS on your switch, you can substitute the
hostname for the IP address with all IP commands, such as ping, telnet, connect, and related Telnet
support operations.
IP defines a hierarchical naming scheme that allows a device to be identified by its location or domain.
Domain names are pieced together with periods (.) as the delimiting characters. For example, Cisco
Systems is a commercial organization that IP identifies by a com domain name, so its domain name is
cisco.com. A specific device in this domain, for example, the File Transfer Protocol (FTP) system is
identified as ftp.cisco.com.
To keep track of domain names, IP has defined the concept of a domain name server, which holds a cache
(or database) of names mapped to IP addresses. To map domain names to IP address es, you must first
identify the hostnames, specify the name server that is present on your network, and enable the DNS.

Default DNS Configuration

Table 7-1 shows the default DNS configuration.
Login Banners
You can configure a message-of-the-day (MOTD) and a login banner. The MOTD banner displays on all
connected terminals at login and is useful for sending messages that affect all network users (such as
impending system shutdowns).
The login banner also displays on all connected terminals. It ap pears after the MOTD banner and before
the login prompts.
The MOTD and login banners are not configured.
Tab l e 7-1 Default DNS Configuration
Feature Default Setting
DNS enable state Enabled.
DNS default domain name None configured.
DNS servers No name server addresses are configured.