I had very little contact with Cisco gear and enjoyed the BSD books of Michael W. Lucas (Absolute BSD and Absolute OpenBSD), so I bought Cisco Routers For The Desperate.
This book aims to be “the book I wished I had read before I first touched a Cisco device”. And I can clearly agree. Read on for the details.
The book is organized in 9 Chapters plus a small appendix on IP addresses and netmasks. It has only 127 pages but it gives you quite a good overview of Cisco routers and how to configure them.
The introduction and chapter 1 will guide you through connecting to your Cisco with a serial console and how to use the command line. Also the difference between exec and privileged exec mode is discussed.
Chapter 2, router configuration, will teach you the basics about running/startup configuration, how to edit the configuration and how to back it up. Chapter 3 discusses the various interfaces (serial, ethernet, loopback and null) and how to set them up.
With chapter 4 it’s getting interesting. WAN connections to ISPs and other office branches are discussed. Michael W. Lucas describes how to choose an ISP for your needs and how to connect your router to his network. Most of the chapter is dedicated to “private connections”, that means private T1 connections to remote offices and not VPN. The static routes and configuration entries for the Ciscos are included and clearly examined.
The next chapter (5) discussed troubleshooting and it is very informative. Lucas includes every hint, from how to check the circuit to interface debugging information. One nice hint is how to use extended pings to test circuits that are working sometimes and sometimes not.
Chapter 6 walks you through an IOS update and describes all the issues like backup, choosing the flash image and recovery.
My personal favorite is chapter 7, redundancy with BGP and HSRP. This is a very long chapter that obviously teaches you how to use BGP and HSRP for redundant connectivity. The basics of BGP and the steps for getting an ASN (Autonomous System Number) are covered. Next the configuration, management and load balancing of BGP are discussed. For a BPG greenhorn like me very informative. The chapter ends with a firm discussion of HSRP and how to combine it with BGP.
Chapter 8 examines all the different login and authentication possibilities on a Cisco; like how to enable SSH. The book ends with a small chapter on various services like NTP, SNMP, and logging.
I really enjoyed reading this book.This is certainly not a detailed discussion of every aspect of Cisco routers but you get all the important information and pointers to where to get the details. I can only restate:
This is “the book I wished I had read before I first touched a Cisco device”. Now I can say that I did.
