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.