Harry Reynolds - JUNOS Enterprise Switching

I dont think better people could have been found to write this book. Doug and Harry not only have an incredible set of technical talentswhich Ive come to know over the yearsbut they also have a great sense of style. Although those virtues alone make them qualified, their track record of success in teaching, training, and consulting has also been put to use for your edification.

Too many technical books jump off the Boring Board into the abyss of Techie Soup. While this book covers plenty of deep technical matters, I think you will find its approach refreshing and compelling.

Now, I cant guarantee that it will lead to any evolutionary process in your own life. But I can certainly say that after you read it, youll have some eye-opening conversations (at least with yourself!). This book will help you quickly acquire knowledge surrounding the topics presented, and it will add to your successful implementation of those technologies.

One thing Ive gained from being part of this books evolutionary process is the burning desire to dive in and get my hands on these switches to see what they can do. While that may not mean much to some of you, anyone who has perused my personal lab on the Internet should understand.

Evolution is progress. The antithesis of that is Congress.... No, sorry, wrong dissertation. The antithesis of that is stagnancy. We should always strive to find new ways to improve our conditions. Whether you apply that to your personal life or to networking, it has the ring of truth.

Darwin said, In the long history of humankind (and animal kind, too) those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed. Let us go forth and collaborate on and improvise our internetworking.

At the very least, as you go through this book and pay attention to the details, youll feel like Saturday Night Lives Church Lady: Well.... Isnt that special!

It wasnt but a day or so after we finished JUNOS Enterprise Routing, the companion book to this one, that our editor started pressuring us to start writing again. Writing a book may seem easy on the surface; how hard could it have been to write some words on these pages? But in reality, writing a book is a time-consuming and collaborative effort that affects everyone close to you. Also, at the time of the request, the EX Series was a new product line, and although we had extensive experience in the switching space, we did not have many customer deployments of the EX Series switches.

We were really impressed when the first EX units arrived for us to put in the rack that we reserved for this book. As JUNOS experts, we expected a lot, and we were impressed at the ease of configuration and stability that the JUNOS software provided to the EX. Although the performance and configuration of the EX switches are slightly different from those of a JUNOS router, the EX platform fit our needs, and hopefully it will fit yours, too.