Cisco IOS Cookbook: Field-Tested Solutions to Cisco Router Problems (Cookbooks

by Ian Brown, Kevin Dooley

While several publishers (including O'Reilly) supply excellent documentation of router features, the trick is knowing when, why, and how to use these features There are often many different ways to solve any given networking problem using Cisco devices, and some solutions are clearly more effective than others. The pressing question for a network engineer is which of the many potential solutions is the most appropriate for a particular situation. Once you have decided to use a particular feature, how should you implement it? Unfortunately, the documentation describing a particular command or feature frequently does very little to answer either of these questions.Everybody who has worked with Cisco routers for any length of time has had to ask their friends and co-workers for example router configuration files that show how to solve a common problem. A good working configuration example can often save huge amounts of time and frustration when implementing a feature that you've never used before. The Cisco Cookbook gathers hundreds of example router configurations all in one place.As the name suggests, Cisco Cookbook is organized as a series of recipes. Each recipe begins with a problem statement that describes a common situation that you might face. After each problem statement is a brief solution that shows a sample router configuration or script that you can use to resolve this particular problem. A discussion section then describes the solution, how it works, and when you should or should not use it. The chapters are organized by the feature or protocol discussed. If you are looking for information on a particular feature such as NAT, NTP or SNMP, you can turn to that chapter and find a variety of related recipes. Most chapters list basic problems first, and any unusual or complicated situations last.The Cisco Cookbook will quickly become your "go to" resource for researching and solving complex router configuration issues, saving you time and making your network more efficient. It

1238 pages, Kindle Edition

First published July 24, 2003

About the author

A Canadian journalist and author.

He is currently the host of Human Edge and The View from Here on TVOntario, and has hosted programming for CBC Radio One, including Later the Same Day, Talking Books, and Sunday Morning.

He has also worked as a business writer at Maclean's and the Financial Post, a feature reporter for The Globe and Mail, and a freelance journalist for other magazines including Saturday Night.
Brown is also the editor of What I Meant to Say: The Private Lives of Men a 2006 collection of twenty-nine essays by prominent Canadian writers, including Greg Hollingshead, David MacFarlane, Don Gillmor, Bert Archer, and Brown himself, who asked his contributors to write on subjects that they'd like to discuss with women but had never been able to.

Brown has also published three books, Freewheeling (1989) about the Billes family, owners of Canadian Tire, and Man Overboard. He is an occasional contributor to the American public radio program This American Life. The Boy in the Moon, a book-length version of Brown's series of Globe and Mail features dealing with his son Walker's rare genetic disorder, Cardiofaciocutaneous Syndrome (CFC), was published in the fall of 2009.

In January 2010, Ian Brown won British Columbia's National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction for his book The Boy in the Moon: A Father's Search for His Disabled Son. The award is Canada's richest non-fiction prize and offers the winner a $40,000 prize. In February, 2010, the book won the Charles Taylor Prize, a $25,000 prize which recognizes excellence in literary non-fiction.

Brown is married to Globe and Mail film critic Johanna Schneller.

Reviews

[Shain · Rating 4 out of 5]

still a great book to refer to time and again for ways to do things with Cisco IOS. it's less about remembering commands and more about the ideas it gives around how best to approach networking related problems