Customer Reviews

Comparing, Designing, and Deploying VPNs

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

 

 

If the author of this book had used a slightly smaller font size, cut down on the number of useless program outputs and screen shots, and cut down on the "fluff" in his text, this book could have fit easily in 300-400 pages and the content would be much easier to digest. In its current form, however, there's a lot of chatter and only tidbits of useful information interspersed seemingly at random.

The author appears to have cut and pasted like a madman anything remotely related to VPNs and the result is something that looks more like a scrapbook than a professional reference. I understand and appreciate the importance of including program output as much as the next person, but you don't have to include the entire output, including banner text, each and every time you run ping or traceroute or netstat, and you definitely don't need to print it in 14pt Courier font each time either.

I bought this book to help me with a VPN I was implementing for a small business, and of the 1000+ pages in this book, there were only around 15-20 pages of info, or about 2%, that was truly pertinent. From the moment I started digging through this tome looking for help on IPSec I was bored to tears by all the program output and sometimes poor quality snapshots that were pasted from other sources.

No doubt there's pertinent info in this book on the subject of VPNs, but in my opinion it's poorly and inefficiently organized, which ultimately serves to diminish the value of this text. If you're fortunate enough to find the specific topic in the index and get the answer you need on the first hit, hurray! More often than not, though, I suspect you'll find yourself wading through page after page of computer-generated text, growing frustrated to the point that you hit the Internet looking for something better.

"Comparing, Designing and Deploying VPNs" introduces various and the most popular VPN technologies, provides explanation on how to select the appropriate VPNs, as well as how to design and deploy them. The book shows each VPN technologies in details, their capabilities and configurations.

The book starts with defining what VPN is, explaining what various VPNs are available and their comparisons. The first chapter introduces a lot of acronyms such as VPWS, VPLS, L2TPv2/v3, AToM and others). It also provides a summary table of technical consideration for selecting each Site-to-Site VPN and Remote Access technologies and a flowchart of all VPN technologies. Both the tables and flowcharts are very useful for reference before progressing to the next chapters.

The book dedicates the next 6 chapters (about 500 pages!) explaining Site-to-Site VPNs starting from designing, deploying and configuring L2TPv3 based Layer 2 VPN, Any Transport over MPLS (AToM) based Layer 2 VPN, MPLS Layer 3 Site-to-Site VPN and Site-to-Site IPSecs VPN. It provides in-depth explanation on how each VPN operates, many elaborate configuration samples with explanation of each commands used, and some advanced designs and deployments.

The first 6 chapters also have the most typos. For instance, in a couple of page, the author refers to previous diagrams by providing the page number xx instead of the actual page number. However, all of these typos are minor and can be ignored.

The next 3 chapters focus on Remote Access VPNs. They cover the design and implementation of L2TPV2 and V3 remote access VPNS, IPSec remote access and finally SSL remote access (WebVPN). They provide several configuration examples on how to implement the remote access VPNs in several VPN gateways from IOS routers, VPN 3000 Series Concentrators, and the new Cisco ASA 5500 series appliance.

The book assumes that the readers already have an extensive knowledge of IGP routing protocols (RIP, EIGRP, ISIS, OSPF), Quality of Service (QoS) and especially BGP. Without knowing them, readers will find difficulties in understanding the examples given as the book uses them extensively. I recommend readers to read Jeff Doyle's "Routing TCP/IP Volume 1 Second Edition" and "Routing TCP/IP volume 2 as well to understand IGP and BGP routing protocols in-depth.

I liked this book a lot and certainly will recommend others to read this. I gave the book five out of five stars for its good explanations, configuration and examples. The book is very technical but well written and provides a lot of examples that can be well understood. Since this is a CiscoPress release book, all of the hardware design and configuration are based on Cisco equipments.

The book has helped me greatly in understanding the different flavors of VPNs available. The IPSec VPN and Remote Access VPN chapters alone are very useful for the VPN project I am currently involved with and they already justify the purchase of this book.

Mark Lewis, the author, is a CCIE who has real work experiences in Service Provider VPN technologies. I also recommend his other book "Troubleshooting Virtual Private Networks (VPN)".

You would think that a VPN should be a fairly simple thing. But of course it isn't. Over a surprisingly short time various companies, groups of companies, standards organizations and seemingly anyone who wants to can come up with a new set of initials to define something special. Just a few examples include: GRE. AToM, Q-in-Q, MPLS LSP, L2F, PPTP. And of course they all mean something that is just a little bit different. This book starts out defining all these and more.

The second part of the book covers site-to-site VPNs. This part has six chapters, and basically each chapter talks about designing and deploying different types of VPNs. The third part of the book is on Remote Access VPNs, covering situations like the telecommuting worker or the salesman out on the road.

This book is by Cisco press so, as you might expect, it concentrates on the use of Cisco equipment. This is not unreasonable as Cisco produces a lot of VPN equipment. Also as you would expect from a Cisco title, the information is complete and accurate. In this book it is also very well written in a language that can be understood. All in all, quite a good book