Cisco Cookbook

Preface

Cisco routers are nearly ubiquitous in IP networks. They are extremely flexible and reliable devices, and the number and variety of features grows with each new release of the Internetwork Operating System (IOS). While Cisco Press and several other publishers supply excellent documentation of router features both online and in a variety of books, knowing when, why, and how to use these features is sometimes difficult. 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 two immediate questions facing any network engineer are: Which of the many potential solutions is the most appropriate for a particular situation? and, Once you have decided to use a particular feature, how should you implement it? Unfortunately, the feature 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 minimize the frustration that sometimes comes with implementing a feature that you’ve never used before.

Cisco Cookbook is not intended to replace the detailed feature documentation included in books such as Cisco IOS in a Nutshell (O’Reilly) or information available on ...