Network Maintenance and Troubleshooting Guide: Field Tested Solutions for Everyday Problems 2nd Edition

Got this for a work-tablet reference volume. It is a handy quick-check guide for most situations you will encounter, though not all. It helps to have some understanding of networking on your own, but with this guide it is not necessary. I often loan my tablet to the newbie and tell him to fix the problem or call me when he gets stuck. After putting this guide on the tablet, I am getting interrupted less and less by the trainee and the intern. That alone is worth it!

Owning a Fluke DTX-1800 Cable Analyzer and this book greatly enhanced anyone's troubleshooting skills. Everyday we encounter challenges in supporting a small to medium enterprise network, reading this is like honing your skills with an experience Tech guru by your side through every chapters .

Allen's book is well suited for the self taught network technician or system administrator who wants a solid, tangible understanding of what Internet traffic means, as a physical phenomenon travelling down a copper wire or optical fiber. There are many books that give good explanations of TCP/IP v4 and v6, describing the packet composition and what the different layers mean. But to some readers of those books, there could be a practical gap between those descriptions and what you have in actual Internet traffic. Hence this book delves strongly at the physical layer level.The early chapters explain diagnostic equipment, like an Optical Time Domain Reflectometer. Other equipment include protocol analysers, handheld network analysers and cable testers. You should certain keep and use the manuals for those objects. But those manuals focus on usages of each specific item. What Allen offers is an overview of the different common tools and how and when to use them, perhaps in concert, to diagnose problems.The first 4 chapters take you up to the MAC layer in physicality and diagnostics. These chapters are the most distinguishing feature of the text. Later chapters are certainly germane, especially when they cover problems related to the physical and MAC layers. But by that time, you have often climbed high enough in abstraction, so that you are dealing with fully digitised packets and you're more in the realm of software.The book also has a cardboard foldout of waveforms for an example Ethernet frame. Perhaps this is of limited use? The reader could be better served by downloading from the book's website.

Very detailed and structured approach.Covers everything I wanted to know Ethernet.Some information can not be found anywhere (unless you are willing to spend a lot of money to buy an IEEE Standard, and themn read it...)

no problems.

Great!

Easy to understand and very educational.

This book is an interesting resource. It is important to know what it is before you purchase it though. This book spends a huge amount of time and energy diagnosing the physical layer of networks. This is great and very important when cabling is expensive and you have expensive tools to troubleshoot. Unfortunately for the book in my environment if a cable tests bad with a cable tester we cut it and replace it and typically don't bother testing them. Cat 5 is cheap, and although the resources in this book are exceptional for what they intend to do, I haven't found much application personally because of the lack of need to test physical connections, find out the exact reason or problem with the connection, and resolve the problem when I can just patch in a new cable and move on for half the testing time and 1/10000th the cost of the testing tools.Great resource if you have lots of layer 1 cabling to troubleshoot though,

Neal is great. This should be a MUST for every Engineer.