Cisco Press Book Review

Troubleshooting Remote Access Networks (CCIE Professional Development) Reviewer Name: Wole Akpose, Technical Director Reviewer Certification: CCNA

Dr. Nedeltchev’s demonstration of his mastery of the terrain is in no doubt. Like an Instructor, he walks you through the ‘art’ of troubleshooting remote access networks, concentrating on 4 of the most popular remote access types; Dial, ISDN, Frame Relay and VPN. The modular layout of the text makes it an easy read, not just for CCIE candidates but an invaluable reference guide for the practicing network engineer, who is confronted with many of the troubleshooting scenario highlighted in the book on a daily basis. The book is organized into five parts.

Section 1 is a must read for everyone interested in remote access network technologies from the end-user customer planning to procure remote access services and solutions, to the service provider customer support engineers whose job it is to ensure customer satisfaction and the infrastructure engineers who are faced with ensuring the health of the system. This section quickly lay out the fundamental issues in Remote Access Network technology, as much as can fit in less than 150 pages, and still provide a good feel for the issues at stake.

Chapters 5 to 22 are where the real juice is. The almost 700 pages of text is divided into four modules, each dealing with one of Dial, ISDN, Frame Relay and VPN, in that other.

A feature I found very useful is the modular nature of the book, providing easy reference for the information you need. In practice, Engineers may not have to work with all technologies, but still find the book handy as a reference to the technology that interests them as well as a quick guide to troubleshooting that technology.

Chapters 5 through 8 describe dial technology and troubleshooting issues and chapters 9 though 13 explores ISDN technology.

Chapters 14 to 18 is on Frame Relay technology and as is the pattern throughout the book starts with an overview of frame Relay technology in 14, moving on to design solutions in chapter 15 and configurations in 16. chapter 17 explores the topic of troubleshooting frame relay network detailing specific commands and pointing to specific tools, while chapter 18 reviews some troubleshooting scenarios including new install, mismatched dlci, traffic shaping, ip multicast and even host migration.

The coverage of VPN is quite detailed (chapters 19 through 22) with description of VPN categories, link technologies and a break down of IKE an IPSec technologies providing the ground work for a full chapter on design and configurations which then presented a clear case for the troubleshooting chapter with Cisco equipment as benchmark. Chapter 22 looks at some real life VPN troubleshooting scenarios. Of course the application environment is Windows. Linux operating systems users of the popular Cisco VPN software will have to get resources from Cisco website.

Like most Cisco press texts, this book has its share of IOS snapshots and scenario examples and lives up to its stated billing as “a guide to understanding tools, commands and methodologies that enable reliable performance of remote access services.”

Having this book within reach when dealing with remote access networks is guaranteed to save you time, no matter what stage of the system you may find yourself—from planning through maintenance/support. For an aspiring CCIE, I will recommend this as a must have.