How to Access and Configure router from Web Browser

Introduction

Cisco is the leading company in computer networking equipment, especially routers. Cisco routers are renowned for their reliability and performance. CLI or command-line interface is a way through which we configure routers. However, Cisco also offers a Web User Interface (WebUI) that provides a more user-friendly way to manage your router. Moreover, there is a limitation of commands as compared to CLI. We will use EVe-NG or GNS3 to simulate this lab, making it accessible for anyone practicing in a virtual lab environment.

Setting Up EVE-NG

We will perform this lab with the help of EVE-NG. You will need to install EVE-NG with the proper configuration and settings. The router we will use is a Cisco 7200 router.

Step 1: Prepare the Router to access from the PC

Add a cloud to the EVE-NG work environment. Assign a network adapter “VMware Network Adapter Vmnet8” to the cloud. The network adapter has an IP address of 192.168.2.1/24.

Click on eve-ng Host cloud and then click on Edit. Assign “Management (Cloud)” to the “Host cloud”.

Step2: Assign IP address to the router

Assign the IP address 192.168.2.10/24 to the router fast ethernet 0/0.

Step 3: Ping the router from the host PC

Open CMD in the host computer, and ping router interface fastethernet 0/0.

Step 4: Configure the Router for Web Access

You will need to enable HTTP or HTTPS services on the router. After assigning the IP address to the router, when you will access the router, then it will not be accessed due to the absence of an “ip http server”. So configure this command first before access the router through the web browser.

Step 5: Access the router from a host PC’s browser

After enabling “ip http server” command on the router, when you access the router from the browser, then you will succeed in accessing the router, but it will prompt for a username and password.

Step 6: Assign username and authentication to the Router

We will assign username “admin” and password “123” to the router with privilege level 15.

As the router has no authentication, due to which every user will access it from the browser. However, we can assign authentication to the router, due to which only legimate user will browse it.

Step 7. Assign authentication to the router

After configuring the username and password at the full privilege level, the user will not be able till now to access the router via browser due to the authentication. We will configure the following command to authenticate the users locally that is trying the router to access it via the browser.

After configuring this command, when you will try to access the router, then you will be able to login to the router through the web browser.

Enter username and password and click on “sign in”.

Here you can configure limited commands as compared to CLI commands. Click on “show diagnostic log” and after that click on “Exec”, you can run various commands to check router details such “show ip route” as below.

If you want to change the router configuration, then click on “Configure”. Here, you will run various commands to change router settings as show below:

For security reasons, if you want to change the http port from 80 to any other port like 2222, then run the following command,

After configuring this command configuration, the default port number will be changed from 80 to 8086, so every user will not access the router through normal web access.

But, the user will write the exact port number bound with the HTTP.

Step 8: For more security reasons, you can apply access list to permit specific IPs to access the router.