Getting Started with Juniper Networking Switches: Beginner Commands

Hey everyone! It’s been a while since my last post, and I’ve missed sharing insights and tips with all of you. Life got a bit busy (as it tends to do), but I’m back and more excited than ever to dive into some valuable tech tidbits. 🕺💻

Today, we’re jumping into something that is a little different than my previous content. I will be going over how you can use your first juniper switch. Today, we will be going over the most basic commands.

1. show configuration interfaces (interface)

Juniper devices have interfaces that typically start with ge-x/x/x. To find out how exactly each interface is configured like, you run this command show configuration interfaces (interface # here), and this will show you how it is configured.

2. show | compare

   Before you run a commit on any changes you made, you can always do a show | compare to make sure you did not make any mistakes, and you can see the changes you made.

3. commit

   a commit applies the changes you made. Always remember to do a show | compare before running a commit!

4. rollback

   If you do a show | compare and you notice that you somehow accidentally made way too many changes that you intended to do, and going back and retyping in commands to fix those changes might take too long, if you run a rollback, it will undo all your changes and just bring back the configuration to the way it was before you ran any of your most recent set commands.

5. show configuration

   Running a show configuration command shows you the entire config of the juniper device you are on.

6. edit

   Junipers typically have two modes, operational and configuration. There are certain commands you can run in either mode. If you are making any sort of changes, you want to be in edit mode. In order to switch over to this mode, you can just type edit and you will be switched over. To go back into operational mode, just type exit.

7. set system root-authentication

When you first get your juniper, you will need to at least, set a plain text password for the root user. You of course have other methods, but if you want to set the password, you can run set system root-authentication plain-text-password. This will prompt you for the password twice then it will be set. If you would like to view other authentication methods, you can run set system root-authentication ?, and the ? will give you a list of what else you can use.

And there you have it folks :)

I will be releasing more Juniper related content weekly. Thank you for reading my quick, short, and easy post! Next one will be much better ;)

Since it is my first blog in forever, I am a little rusty, but with time, I hope to start making even better articles like I did before 😏

Thank you all again and stay tuned for my next article on networking 🫡