Rating: 
Summary: Excellent text; thorough treatment of IOS inner workings.
Review: After a short review of this text, I felt compelled to write a review for the benefit of others. The book provides an excellent overview of cisco IOS and, more specifically, core router architecture. It will remain in my library as a reference for hardware troubleshooting. Coverage of the GSR internals are enough to warrant the purchase of this book.Excellent job Russ, Curtis, and Vijay.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent text; thorough treatment of IOS inner workings.
Review: After a short review of this text, I felt compelled to write a review for the benefit of others. The book provides an excellent overview of cisco IOS and, more specifically, core router architecture. It will remain in my library as a reference for hardware troubleshooting. Coverage of the GSR internals are enough to warrant the purchase of this book. Excellent job Russ, Curtis, and Vijay.
Rating: 
Summary: A good Resource
Review: Book has a lot of good info but it's short on details. For example, the discussion on processes is informative but doesn elucidate on which process is which priority and what scenerios can prempt the priorties. You will have to look at the output of a router yourself to figure this out. Of course getting the same info from Cisco TAC is almost impossible! Good reference on the internal architecture of the the 7500 and 12000 series boxes. Overpriced for the quantity of info but worth-while addition to a reference library. NOT for newbies to Cisco platform.
Rating:
Summary: Exceptional overview of router architecture
Review: Excellent book for anyone wanting to know exactly how Cisco IOS software (and router hardware) really works. Functionally complete explanation of the different switching methods that IOS employs, as well as an in-depth view of a few hardware architectures. For anyone who ever wanted (or needed) to know how Cisco implements queueing and shared memory, and how CEF/dCEF work their magic. Also includes a large poster-size flow chart in the back of the book illustrating the steps packets take from being received to being routed and sent back out for several different architectures.
Rating:
Summary: Exceptional overview of router architecture
Review: Excellent book for anyone wanting to know exactly how Cisco IOS software (and router hardware) really works. Functionally complete explanation of the different switching methods that IOS employs, as well as an in-depth view of a few hardware architectures. For anyone who ever wanted (or needed) to know how Cisco implements queueing and shared memory, and how CEF/dCEF work their magic. Also includes a large poster-size flow chart in the back of the book illustrating the steps packets take from being received to being routed and sent back out for several different architectures.
Rating:
Summary: Deepens your understanding
Review: I bought this book and read it cover to cover in about two weeks (which for me is pretty good). It's definitely not for beginners, in fact it really benefits people who are running BFRs like 7200 and bigger. Good detail about 7500 and 12000 architectures. It also gave me a lot of little bits of knowledge that made sense but I hadn't thought about before. Example - if you have a 7206 stacked with fast ethernet cards but your only using half of them, IOS is allocating buffer space to every interface anyway, so pull those cards. Other topics are queuing methods like weighted RED and a very coherent discussion of process/fast/CEF/distributed switching. Pricey book but I thought it was worth it.
Rating:
Summary: Deepens your understanding
Review: I bought this book and read it cover to cover in about two weeks (which for me is pretty good). It's definitely not for beginners, in fact it really benefits people who are running BFRs like 7200 and bigger. Good detail about 7500 and 12000 architectures. It also gave me a lot of little bits of knowledge that made sense but I hadn't thought about before. Example - if you have a 7206 stacked with fast ethernet cards but your only using half of them, IOS is allocating buffer space to every interface anyway, so pull those cards. Other topics are queuing methods like weighted RED and a very coherent discussion of process/fast/CEF/distributed switching. Pricey book but I thought it was worth it.
Rating:
Summary: A brilliant tour of the Internals !!
Review: I have just completed reading this book and I must say - it was a brilliant handling of a tricky subject like the "Internals" of an operating system.Must for anyone wanting to know what happens 'inside' that router of yours. I felt the authors could have spent a little more time on the Cisco 12000 GSR section. Though only 200 odd pages - its "packed" with stuff and it would take you a week to run through the book once.The first chapter is a killer - you will take time over it - so dont fret if your spending a lot of time there !! Splendid effort !! When's the follow up expected ???
Rating:
Summary: Very Good Information - You need this.
Review: I was looking for this information to supplement the information provided in the support exam documentation and the performance field guide from MG Hill, and online docs. This book has great information but does need to have a different name as I thought this would be more geared toward how the IOS was actually programmed and give a better understanding of IOS versions. If you troubleshoot networks this is part of the magic bullet needed to help in understanding memory and memory pool allocation, IOS Resource Management, processes, CPU, buffers, and cache. The book spends quite a bit of time on large scale routers and needs to give a bit more focus on smaller scale equipement, also the information on Netflow is only 5 pages long
Rating:
Summary: What there is is pretty good.
Review: There is a lot of good information in this book that I've never seen anywhere else, so I'm going to give it 4 stars...though, it should be called something like "How some Cisco routers switch packets and use buffers". It is far from a thorough treatment of IOS internals- but what is there is well written and valuable. I especially enjoyed the discussions about the algorithms and data structures used by the various fast switching methods.
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