Many internet hardware products offer a read-only access mode, which I’m guessing is to keep Mr. Slacky from screwing up the config – ahem, no router bgp 6078 – on your live core router. But that’s the problem, Cisco doesn’t offer an elegant solution for read-only access to their routers. You can modify the exec level for show running-config, although the output ends up being completely useless because you didn’t supply a new exec level for all of the associated commands that are necessary to gather the configuration.

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