Cisco's Core Dumps to an FTP

There are times when you will need to capture a core dump of a Cisco device that has been crashing.

Core dumps contains a copy of the router's entire memory contents. In some circumstances this will help technical support to determine what is causing the crash of your network device or will help the developers to pin-point bugs.

Cisco provides a simple way for doing this. In our case we are going to configure and FTP server as the destination for the core dumps.


By default, the processor memory core dump is written to a file named "hostname-core", or "hostname-coreiomem" on certain platforms with IO Memory.

Lets assume our FTP server is 150.100.1.100, and that we have a username and password of "cisco" to access the server. The configuration will look like:

!
ip ftp source-interface Loopback0 !It is always good practice to source from Loopbacks
ip ftp username ciscoip ftp password cisco
exception protocol ftp ! Here you define select rcp,ftp,tftp or flash
exception dump 150.100.1.100 ! This is our FTP server
!

You can test your configuration by generating a dump without rebooting the device. From enable mode execute "write core" and this will write a dump to your FTP.

For more information see Creating Core Dumps