Can a router configure itself?
Teach one console behavior for €2,400 once. A wiped IOS XR spine drives itself back into the metro fabric with no startup config.
Can a router configure itself? Do you still need complex zero-touch provisioning, or a complex software-defined network controller?
Watch how my small language model brings up a spine and a leaf in a Cisco Agile Services Networking metro design, in no time.
Detailed walkthrough
A wiped IOS XR spine drove itself back into the fabric with no startup config.
The model typed the config like an engineer sitting beside it.
A router should be a self-driving car. The road is which command-line command to type. The destination is a role you already know from the design: a spine, or a leaf.
The model is told which role it is, then it brings up interfaces, segment routing, IS-IS, and BGP. It checks adjacency, locators, flexible algorithm, and neighbor pings.
About 9 minutes. I sit beside the console and just watch. The typing in between is the model, or me, if my finger gets itchy.
Three videos, same self-driving car
Dial home. No DHCP bootfile, nobody at the site, just an address and a path to the management server. Classic zero-touch provisioning is still right when you have option 67 and a file server. This is the other case.
Router self-provisions with a local model, no zero-touch bootfile
Join the underlay with no address plan handed to it. Empty startup, neighbors already up, the box derives its place and pings both peers.
Segment Routing over IPv6 self-provisioning
Take a spine or a leaf role and provision it. That is this video. Wide use cases:
- Hardware swap.
- Pre-staging a config for a new install.
- A new router or switch boots and puts itself on the network operations center’s screen without a human watching it. Turn a legacy router into something cloud-native, or call it agent-native.
Self-diagnose is my next video. The self-driving car should pull over, run the shows, and name the fault. It should not invent a new road. Provision and diagnosis stay separate jobs. A human still checks and commits.
Spine and leaf, this clip:
Fine-tuned model provisions spine and leaf on Cisco IOS XR
The same note is on LinkedIn.
Teach the model your own job
The spine and the leaf are two behaviors this model already has. The same path works for another job you already trust and can show with examples: an access edge, a route reflector, the rebuild after a hardware swap, a procedure your team repeats. One operating system. One behavior. I teach that to the small model that types on the console. You still check, and you still commit.
That teaching is a service. €2,400 once, excluding value-added tax, for one behavior on one operating system. A second behavior is a second order. It is not a platform license, and it is not “anything, unlimited, in one invoice.”
After the behavior is taught, a single node still follows the Config Desk list: a leaf is €49, a supervised two-hour window is €190.
The €2,400 sits next to what a fixed-price zero-touch setup for one switch role costs in public UK packs (£1,500–£3,000) and next to a small custom-model project (€1,200–€3,000 to start). You are paying for the taught job and a lab check, not for graphics-card hours.