Juniper Networks Field Guide and Reference
| 2002-10-11 00:00:00 | | 0 | Networks
Guide condenses thousands of pages of manuals, tech notes, and engineering resources into a single book. Provides information hand-picked and edited by the person responsible for documenting all Juniper technologies. Softcover.
User review
Out of Date But Still Largely Relevant and Useful
Juniper has a chunk of what once was Cisco's core routing business, but it has a very small fraction of published pages in this area. This book is from 2002 and is still one of only a handful of books available on the M and T Series in the service provider space. It also refers to a lot of obsolete products (M5, M10, M40 and the infamous M160). Even with that, and the fact that it's kind of a `meta documentation` book rather than a case study guide or design reference as Cisco might put out, this is still a pretty useful book.
JUNOS and its many advantages over IOS (way more stable and secure, typically higher performing, commit/rollback capabilities, far better high availability features) are not that different than what they were three years ago, and this book explains them quite well. The architecture of Juniper routers is also the same, both in terms of the separate routing and packet forwarding engines, and the midplane design of the hardware with port interface cards (PICs) and flexible PIC concentrators (FPC).
In a sense, it's more likely that a single Juniper book can cover a variety of platforms over the course of several years than it would be for Cisco. The upgrade procedures for Juniper are far simpler, and there is only a single code train for all platforms, whereas figuring out how to pick the right version of IOS can be quite a chore.
Still, there are a lot of Juniper enhancements that are not covered here and that really should be available in something more than the online docs. For instance, VPLS completely antedates this book, and Juniper's MPLS support includes some a very nice enhancement to RSVP (e.g., the point to multipoint LSP) which outdoes anything Cisco has for transmitting broadcast video across backbone networks. Also, the E Series for broadband aggregation and service routing is not mentioned at all. Finally, the products that came from the NetScreen acquisition offer some unique power and flexibility in terms of being able to set up managed services; this should be covered in a follow-on volume as well.
But the good news is that (due to Juniper's consistency) the current material is valid and will be helpful for current M and T series routers. Although the configuration snippets throughout the book are mostly documentation syntax (instead of real examples), there is an extensive configurations chapter for ATM, BGP, ISIS, and Layer 3 MPLS VPNs. So I'd give the book three stars, though when it came out it would have been four. Still, it's time for someone to start publishing some service provider oriented books that explain how to configure revenue-generating services for network operators that have been hung out to dry by Cisco's `Love the Internet whether it makes you profitable or not` philosophy.
User review
Excellent precis of Juniper's documentation
This book serves as an excellent precis of the full JUNOS and Juniper hardware documentation set. Written by senior staff in Juniper's own technical publications team, it is sufficiently small for a field engineer to have on hand when working in the field and sufficiently detailed that a user can configure most features without referring to any other documentation.
For those looking for in depth reviews of how the protocols work, this isn't the book you want (there are numerous books providing the gory details of all the protocol behaviour). If you just want to know how to build, operate and troubleshoot a Juniper network, this is the book you need.