It is advisable that on all your devices in your network, you have a disclaimer or message that appears when someone connects to your device. There have been many cases over the years where a hacker has gained access, been caught, and got away with it since there was nothing in place informing that they were not welcome on the device.
By NO means, is this a “Welcome” message, this should state your companies access rights policy and who should and should not be allowed to access the device. There are a few option available for configuring a message on a Cisco device all of which fall under the command ‘banner’. In the live demo below I have shown an example of configuring a MOTD (message of the day), that will be displayed when you connect to the router or switch.
From global configuration mode, you can enter the command ‘banner’ if you were to put a ‘?’ afterwards, you will see all the banner types supported, including ‘motd’. When configuring any banner, you need to select a delimiting character to mark the start and end of the banner. In most cases I recommend using the ‘#’ symbol. This allows us to enter the command ‘banner motd # <enter>’ which puts us into a banner menu. You can then type or paste any message that you would like to appear, pressing <enter> again will move you to a new line, and the device will only stop gathering you text once you submit another ‘#’ to mark the ending of the message.
