Cisco routers are the industry standard, to which all other routers are compared. Whether you love them or hate them, you still must live with them. While they're generally robust and reliable, when a Cisco router breaks someone needs to fix it. If you're in IT, when they say someone they mean you. This book provides a brief introduction to Cisco routers, with a tight focus on what you need to know to get the router up and working in the shortest amount of time. Reading this book once will give you the knowledge on how your router and internet circuit work. Leaving it on top of the router for reference during a crisis will give you a step-by-step guide to troubleshooting when things go wrong. Most Cisco books with real technical content are heavy enough to stun a moose with; this book is small enough to read in a couple of hours and light enough to carry around in your laptop bag.

Whenever the office router breaks and the Internet disappears, managers always have the same question: "how can we keep this from happening again?" You will learn how to implement multiple levels of redundancy with Cisco routers, and the drawbacks with each.

You'll learn how to upgrade your router, back up your router configuration, implement a private WAN, and more!

The hardest part of becoming comfortable with any new computing platform, whether it be a router or an operating system, is learning how it expects you to think. CR4tD will give you insight into the Cisco world, so that even if you have to implement bleeding-edge features you'll be comfortable with the environment the router offers.

No book is perfect, and CR4tD is no exception. If something doesn't look right in your book, take a look at the errata page. Errors will be corrected in future printings.

About the author:

MICHAEL LUCAS is the author of the popular Absolute BSD, Big Scary Daemons BSD column for the O'Reilly Network. He has been a pet wrangler, a librarian, a security consultant, and now works as a network engineer/sysadmin/consultant/generally responsible party. You can see his personal web page for more information.