There are many reasons why I enjoy working with Cisco products, in fact probably to many to even cover in a blog format. However, one of the top reasons why I like Cisco is the quality of their technical documentation. To often, for example with Nortel you get just a bit of documentation frosting thrown in with the expensive product you may have just purchased. With Cisco I have always felt that you could easily read for hours on end. The hours spent reading would be at times more valuable than similar hours put in reading competitors documentation or printed books.
Here are a few short PDF documents, which I tend to keep handy or re-read;
- Understanding the Ping and Traceroute Commands
- Using the Extended ping and Extended traceroute Commands
Lately I have been going back to those documents due an on going latency and general network degradation of service investigation at work. At work we have a very mixed environment in regards to both age of equipment and also the vendors who provide the equipment. Wishing some vendors would step up the quality of their products and provide simple things like the ability to run a debug ip packet command in IOS.
