10.2 Basic Security
10.2.8 Banner messages
The login banner, or message of the day, is the text that appears on the screen when you open a Telnet session or console port connection to the switch. The login banner can be up to 255 characters long. To configure the login banner, perform the task illustrated in Figure while in privileged mode.

You can verify the login banner configuration by ending your session and reconnecting, or by viewing the configuration using the show configuration command. This example shows how to configure the login banner (using the percent sign [%] as the delimiting character) when connected through the console port:

To configure the message of the day in Cisco IOS Software, issue the following command:

Router(config)#banner motd % message here %

As in the example in Figure , the % is the delimiter in the command and is used to indicate the beginning and ending of the message. The delimiter can be any character, as long as it is not used anywhere else in the message.