The first four chapters cover what would be considered essential system administration functions if a router were a server. Chapter 1 covers router configuration and file management issues. In Chapter 2, we turn to useful router management tricks such as command aliases, using CDP and DNS, tuning buffers, and creating exception dumps. This chapter ends with a set of four scripts that generate various useful reports to help you manage your routers. Chapter 3 discusses user access and privileges on the router. Chapter 4 extends this discussion to using TACACS+ to provide centralized management of user access to your routers.
The next five chapters cover various aspects of IP routing. Chapter 5 looks at IP routing in general, including static routes and administrative distances. In Chapter 6, we focus on RIP, including both Versions 1 and 2. Chapter 7 looks at EIGRP, and Chapter 8 at OSPF. In Chapter 9, we discuss the BGP protocol, which controls all IP routing through the backbone of the Internet.
The remaining chapters all cover separate topics. We look at the popular Frame Relay WAN protocol in Chapter 10.
Chapter 11 discusses queuing and congestion. This chapter also examines various IP Quality of Service issues.
In Chapter 12, we look at IP tunnels and VPNs. This chapter includes a discussion of Cisco's IPSec implementation.
We turn to issues related to dial backup in Chapter 13.
In Chapter 14, we look at time. We include a relatively detailed discussion of the NTP protocol, which you can use to synchronize the clocks of all of your routers. You can then use them as time sources for other equipment, including application servers on your network.
Chapter 15 is primarily concerned with configuring the DLSw protocol. It also looks at SNA and SDLC protocols, which are often carried over IP networks using DLSw.
In Chapter 16, we show how to configure several of the most popular interface types on a Cisco router.
Chapter 17 and Chapter 18 look at the closely related issues of network management and logging. In Chapter 17, we discuss SNMP in particular. This chapter includes several router configuration examples to use with SNMP, as well as a number of scripts that you can use to help manage your Cisco equipment. Chapter 18 looks at issues related to managing the router's event logs, as well how to use the syslog protocol to send these log messages to a central server.
It's impossible to do much on a Cisco router without having a good understanding of access lists. There are several different kinds of access lists, and Chapter 19 shows several useful and interesting applications of the various IP-specific access lists.
In Chapter 20, we look at DHCP. Routers usually just act as DHCP proxy devices, but we also show how to use the router as a DHCP server, or even as a client.
Chapter 21 talks about NAT, which allows you to use private IP addresses and resolve conflicting address ranges between networks.
One of the best ways to build a fault tolerant LAN is to configure two or more routers to share a single IP address using HSRP. We show several different HSRP configurations in Chapter 22.
In Chapter 23, we look at how to implement multicast routing functionality on a Cisco router.
We also include two appendixes. Appendix A discusses the various external software tools that we use throughout the book, and shows how to obtain your own copies of these packages. Appendix B gives some helpful background on IP Quality of Service and the various queueing algorithms that you can use on Cisco routers.
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