Use Cisco SDM without killing your FireFox tabs.
This one has plagued me for quite a while. I use Firefox and I always have tons of tabs. And if you use Cisco SDM to configure routers, which I tend to (to at least get the bigger chunks of configuration done), then you’ve experienced that wonderful feeling that you get when you close SDM and all of your firefox windows (probably 3 or 4 at this point) go away, along with your tabs. And when you re-open firefox, you notice that you have to recover from a crashed session, and you can only recover the last 3 sessions or whatever. ARRRRRRGGGGHHHH!!!… I’ve said many times….
So what is the solution? You can set your default browser to IE, and then SDM will happily work through IE, and when you close, you won’t loose any of your Firefox sessions. But if you do that, then everytime you click on a link from any source, they open in IE and not Firefox. Bummer. So after much digging, I have figured out a way to have it work the way I want.
My solution is based on the IE View add-on available for Firefox from here. What this view allows you to do is open up any page that you have in FF in a separate IE window. And just like IE Tab, you can specify sites that should always open in IE. Great news!! Now how to make it work?
So after some poking around, running things manually, I figured out that the SDMlauncher.exe program, merely calls up (using your default browser setting) c:\program files\Cisco Systems\common\common\launcher.html and passes it some arguments. That will then load (with the arguments) in a browser window, which then opens other browser windows, etc.. So in IE View, if you simply add in ‘file:///C:/Program%20Files/Cisco%20Systems/Cisco%20SDM/common/common/launcher.html’, then your set. Thats literally all there is to it.
So when you open up SDM Launcher, and put in the IP address, and click launch, you will see a tab get created in FF and within a millisecond (or so) IE will open and reload the page. That will in-turn, perform all the actions that your used to when running SDM, but in IE. The tab that you have in FF just has a placeholder message about the page being loaded in IE. Once your done in SDM, you simply close the program, all of your IE windows (that are part of the SDM chain) will go away, and the tab in FF will even go away. Very cool indeed!
Good luck with it and I hope this helps you out!