Customer Reviews

BGP

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

From reading this book you can see that the author has brought to the table a clear explaination of BGP. I for the longest time have tried to find a book to turn people on to when they tell me they want to learn more about the subject. This book defines from top to bottom a great fundimental understanding about the protocol. I recommend this if you would like to learn more about BGP or if you need to implement it.

The Border Gateway Protocol is a critical part of the Internet. Its operation is also completely invisible to almost everyone on the Internet. Only ISPs and companies with high bandwidth or reliability requirements. So unless you work in such an environment or want to their may not be anything of immediate interest for you in it. The subject is still interesting however.

The author starts the book off with a gentle introduction to multi-homing and why you would need or want to run BGP on your router. Someone without any experience with basic IP networking
concepts or Cisco experience will probably be lost very quickly. There is an appendix that describes the basics of Cisco configuration. The book only covers Cisco routers, which are the routers most companies are using anyway.

The book continues with some excellent tutorials on how to use BGP in your network. There are a lot of detailed explanations of all the components that make up BGP both from the perspective of a network that wants to use BGP and from the perspective of an ISP. There are even a lot of examples of the way an ISP handles more political issues like peering with other ISPs and there is an entire chapter on dealing with the day-to-day issues on your network.

Overall, this is an excellent guide to using and configuring BGP. The only thing lacking was an accompanying CD with the book. Since many of these complex protocols require practice, so some sort of simulator would have really completed the package.

For the last year or two I have been searching for a book that would allow me to understand the fundamentals as well as the advanced concepts in BGP. For the last year or two I have grown frustrated with the books from Cisco Press - either the writing would just put your lights out or that there is overwhelming amount of information on packets that would distract if not deter you from trying to focus on learning the protocol. Then this book came along and the author has done an outstanding job in organizing and presenting the materials that would surely keep the junior to senior level network guys interested and best of all the author clearly knows how to explain the BGP concepts in an easier to understand manner. I highly recommend this book for junior to senior network guys who have the desire to learn BGP. Learning BGP has never been easier with this book.

Few of us deal with the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) on a daily basis. I am not one of those whose network responsibilities include interdomain routing. I bought this book to learn more about the BGP protocol and its security characteristics. Most people fear attacks on the root name servers, as happened in October 2002. BGP, though, could offer another disaster in waiting. When the L0pht hacker group claimed before the Governmental Affairs Committee in May 1998 that it was possible to make the Internet "unusable" in 30 minutes, they were probably referring to resetting TCP sessions between BGP peers. In fact, RFC 2385 was released three months later to address that very threat.

van Beijnum's book addresses the threat and consequences of tearing down BGP sessions, and much more. "BGP" presents an insider's look within the secret group who administer some of the most crucial aspects of Internet infrastructure. Being an outsider, I was not able to digest everything the book offered. I learned some memorable lingo: "the swamp" is the part of the class C address space assigned before Classless Inter-Domain Routing (CIDR) was used. Unfortunately, "route flap dampening" was mentioned several times before being explained in chapter 10.

I most enjoyed the chapters on security, traffic engineering, and troubleshooting. van Beijnum presents lots of Cisco IOS configuration samples, and he clearly knows BGP. I could have used some additional introductory sections and would have liked to see Ethereal or similar protocol analysis of BGP messages for reference. In a world dominated by books on LANs, I like seeing books on the WAN. Don't expect "BGP" to hold your hand, however.

Whether you're a network architect, engineer, operator/technician this book will provide valuable insight into BGP for your particular purpose. This book is mostly practical and doesn't delve much into the intricate details of BGP/distance-vector routing such as explanation of algorithms, but rather focuses on the setup, operation, and troubleshooting of BGP and related networking concepts.

The first four chapters briefly cover TCP/IP, routing protocols, IP addressing with respect to BGP, etc. I found the chapter on IP addressing most useful, since it's not quite clear how the allocations work with the various governing organizations (IANA, ARIN, RIPE, APNIC, etc.) that manage the IP address allocations and deal with the depletion of IP address space.

The meat of the book is in the chapters on configuring BGP and Traffic Engineer, both which were an excellent read. A lot of this book can be selectively read, since it can go into detail for large networks which also run an IGP protocol or use route reflectors, which is useful if you're considering extending your network especially in the case of multiple POPs.

The troubleshooting sections provides a mix of common BGP problems along with how to deal with support from various ISPs. There is also a section that explains with how to deal with other NOCs, which I believe is common sense, but needs explanation as many people seem to do the wrong thing and don't get anywhere.

I've had this book for several years now, and I often come back to it to refresh my understanding on certain aspects of BGP and routing. Lastly,
this book is very cisco-centric in configuration of BGP, however I found
the configs useful although I mainly work with Juniper or host-based
implementations of BGP that use different syntax and I had little problem
translating the configs.

Highly recommended and solid book for those that want to understand the practical use of BGP.

I found this book to be a great introduction to BGP, as well as getting into intermediate and a few more advanced topics. Though top network engineers for very large ISPs will need more in depth information in some areas, the information provided here is adequate for the majority of us who want to multi-home.

The book is very Cisco-focused, as the author states (paraphrasing) he doesn't want to turn the book into a discussion of the nuances of various BGP implementations. You can easily take the knowledge learned here and apply it to other software though, this book was very helpful for me using OpenBSD's openbgpd.

One of the things I like about the book is it mostly skips the fluff too often found in similar books. If you don't have a fundamental understanding of networking, you have no hope for configuring BGP, and need to seek other resources to first gain the requisite foundational networking knowledge. These don't have a place in a book focused on BGP. The book mostly doesn't try to introduce you to these topics, though I question the inclusion of a 6 page appendix on "Cisco Configuration Basics". It's too brief to be of any use to someone who doesn't know those things, and you don't have any business configuring BGP on a Cisco router if you don't already have a strong grasp of everything in that appendix before you even open this book.

The book is well done, and I recommend it for anyone looking to learn BGP. Just get your foundational networking knowledge elsewhere first. BGP isn't a topic for beginners, and that rightly isn't the book's focus.

This book is a quick reference for configuring BGP. The author's approach is clear and simple, it capture the attention of a Cisco Professionals who already knows BGP from the Training Courses or from the lenghty and boring Routing TCP/IP Volume II of CiscoPress.

This book is a non-nonsense approach to BGP quick configuration with simple and clear explanation.