Cisco supports a huge variety of different media types. There are over 50 different types of interface adapters available for the 7200 series routers alone. Of course, many of these are closely related variants such as the same OC3 card with multimode or single mode fiber connectors. The sheer variety of different media types makes it impossible for us to cover them all in any detail, so this chapter will focus instead on some of the most popular interface types. We will also look at a few interface types that have particularly interesting features or are tricky to set up properly.
We also suggest looking at some of the other chapters in this book where we have covered interface-specific material. For example, there is useful information on serial interfaces in the discussion of Frame Relay in Chapter 10. Similarly, we covered a lot of ISDN information while discussing Dial Backup in Chapter 13. And there is some discussion of both SDLC serial configuration and Token Ring features in Chapter 15, which looks at DLSw. Further, the HSRP discussion in Chapter 22 includes several useful Ethernet and Token Ring features.
Whole books have been written on each of the different media types discussed in this chapter, so we clearly can't offer a very comprehensive summary here. For information about the various serial media, refer to T1: A Survival Guide (O'Reilly). Ethernet: The Definitive Guide (O'Reilly) includes a vast amount of useful and interesting information about how Ethernet works, and Designing Large-Scale LANs (O'Reilly) includes information about other LAN protocols including Token Ring and ATM, as well as information about VLAN trunking protocols.
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