Cisco IOS Access Lists

Preface

Building and maintaining a network involves more than just making sure that packets can flow between devices on the network. As a network administrator, you also want to ensure that only the right people can access resources on your network, and that your network will continue to run even if parts of that network fail or are configured incorrectly. Your organization may have directives that you need to implement, like using cheaper network paths whenever possible. In short, while maintaining connectivity is important, you also need to implement security, robustness, and business policies with your network.

This book is about network policies and how to implement those policies using Cisco IOS access lists. I present a way to think about access lists and network policy, describe how access lists are built, and give examples of how to apply those access lists in different situations. Along the way, there are a number of sidebars and notes about concepts and information important to using access lists, and at the end of the book, there are appendixes with useful reference material.

A brief note about what I cover: the access lists in this book deal only with the Internet Protocol (IP), though you could probably use many of the same techniques with other network protocols as well. While all the examples involve Cisco IOS access lists, many of the concepts are generic and can be applied to other router vendors’ equipment. I’ve tried to make the examples in this book applicable ...