Acknowledgments

Faraz Shamim:

Alhamdulillah ! I thank God for giving me the opportunity to write this book, which I hope will help many people in resolving their routing issues.

I would like to thank my manager, Srinivas Vegesna, and my previous manager and mentor, Andrew Maximov, for supporting me in this book project. Special thanks goes to Bob Vigil, who let me use some of his presentation material in the RIP and IGRP chapter. I would also like to thank Alex Zinin for clearing some of my OSPF concepts that I used in this book. I would like to thank my co-authors, Zaheer Aziz, Abe Martey, and Johnson Liu, who put up with my habit of reminding them of their chapter deadlines. I would also like to thank Chris Cleveland and Amy Lewis of Cisco Press for their understanding whenever we were late in submitting our chapters.

Zaheer Aziz:

All thanks to God for giving me strength to work on this book. I heartily thank my wife for her support, patience, and understanding that helped me put in many hours on this book. I appreciate the flexibility of my employer, Cisco Systems, Inc. (in particular, my manager, Srinivas Vegesna) for allowing me to work on this book while keeping my day job. Many thanks to Syed Faraz Shamim (lead author of this book), who invited me through a cell -phone call from San Jose to Washington, D.C., where I was attending IETF 46 in 1999, to co-author this book. Thanks to Moiz Moizuddin for independently reviewing the technical content of my chapters. I would like to credit my mentor, Syed Khalid Raza, for his continuous guidance and for showing me the world of BGP. Finally, I wish to thank Cisco Press, who made this book possible ‚ in particular, Christopher Cleveland and Brian Morgan, whose suggestions greatly improved the quality of this book and made this process go smoothly.

Johnson Liu:

I would like to thank my friends and colleagues at Cisco Systems, with whom I spent many late hours with trying to troubleshoot P1 routing protocol problems. Their professionalism and knowledge are simply unparalleled. Special thanks to my managers, Andrew Maximow and Raja Sundaram, who have given me all their support throughout my career at Cisco Systems. Finally, I would like to thank my technical editors for their invaluable input and suggestions to improve this book.

Abe Martey:

First of all, I'd like to express sincere thanks to the co-authors and colleagues at work, Faraz, Johnson, and Zaheer for dreaming up this title and inviting me to participate in its materialization. We all worked on the Cisco Technical Assistance Center (TAC) Routing Protocol Team, giving us quite a bit of experience troubleshooting IP routing problems. This work is our attempt to generously share that experience with a larger audience beyond the Cisco Systems work environment.

I received a lot of support, mentorship, and training from many Cisco TAC and development engineers , as well as many direct and nondirect managers as a TAC Engineer. Hats off to this unique breed of talented individuals, women and men, who have committed their lives to keep the Internet running. I'd also like to thank these folks (too many of them to name here) for every bit of knowledge and wisdom that they've shared with me over the years .

Over time, I've developed great personal relationships with various networking professionals worldwide, all of whom I met as customers or through IETF, NANOG, IEEE, and other professional conferences and meetings. I'd like to sincerely thank them for sharing with me their knowledge and expertise, as well as their professional insights and visions into the future of networking technology.

I'd also like to express my sincerest gratitude to Amy Lewis and Chris Cleveland, both of Cisco Press, and the technical editors for their roles in helping bring this book to fruition. Many thanks to several close relatives for their support and encouragement all through this project.