Cisco Router Performance Field Guide (Cisco Technical Expert) Book

If the router ain't happy, ain't nobody happy. Cisco Router Performance Field Guide describes a series of strategies for determining whether a given Cisco Systems router is doing what it's supposed to be doing and doing those jobs at peak efficiency. It also includes a lot of information on adjusting configuration files to correct problems and improve performance. Author Gil Held is a respected expert on Cisco products, and he upholds his reputation here. Network administrators who have their routing gear in place and are in optimisation and troubleshooting mode will like what they find here. This book is heavy on prose, packing lots of facts and concepts into each paragraph. For that reason, this isn't a book for the novice, and even some veterans may take some time in deciphering what Held has written in certain places. As aids to the practical-minded, this book includes a fair number of command-and-response listings, plus some listings of configuration files. The main shortcoming of this book is the illustrations. Some editor clearly decided that illustrations were necessary for their own sake, and so burdened an otherwise excellent book with pointless screen shots of console windows and file listings. There aren't too many of those, though, and Held's excellent explanations and documentation shine through. --David Wall, amazon.com Topics covered: Troubleshooting, optimising, and gauging performance on Cisco routers, particularly those of the 4000 series and 7000 family. Emphasis goes to gauging usage of LAN and WAN link capacity, as well as usage of hardware resources like memory and processor capacity. The author documents various Cisco and Microsoft Windows NT diagnostic utilities, such as trace and tracert, as well.Read More