Profiles And Connections; System And Profile Parameters - Cisco 700 Series Configuration Manual

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.
System and Profile Parameters
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>
2-2 Cisco700 Series Router Configuration Guide