Customer Reviews

IPv6 Network Administration

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

 

 

IPv6 Network Administration is an absolutely first-rate technical guide. It is refreshing to read a book that doesn't waste time by assuming the reader has no networking background. IPv6 Network Administration achieves just the right balance between history, theory, and practical application to serve the needs of administrators and interested readers. If you've been waiting for the right resource from which to learn IPv6, this book is it.

The preface, a less than useful part of many books, offers an interesting history of IPv6 development. Rather than assume IPv4 is worthless, ch 1 and 2 debate IPv4's merits; ch 1 is anti-IPv4 and ch 2 is pro-IPv4. In ch 3 we learn IPv6 details, and here the authors' writing style and judgement shines. They avoid describing every detail of IPv6, and instead summarize or present just the important parts of the protocol. This technique could have earned the book the title "Practical IPv6".

Another smart choice made by the authors involves relating IPv6 concepts in IPv4 terms, where possible and appropriate. For example, ch 3 shows how neighbor solicitation fulfills a role similar to ARP. It will be many years before any student of networking will have to ignore learning IPv4, so I appreciate authors who speak in familiar terms.

Beginning in ch 5 and elsewhere, the authors make a third excellent decision. Rather than just present a Linux command reference and a Windows command reference, they present syntax for many operating systems and networking devices. This must have taken a decent amount of research, but such level of detail makes the work accessible to a wide audience. I found the use of FreeBSD in repeated examples to be particularly appealing.

The authors are not shy about saying what works and what doesn't when IPv6 is involved. In ch 7 they present some novel ways to work around certain issues, e.g., using netcat6 for port forwarding IPv6 traffic. They even show programming examples and outline new aspects of the sockets API to handle IPv6 addressing in ch 8.

Finally, IPv6 Network Administration presents workable ways for admins to give IPv6 a try, such as 6to4 and other tunnel methods. Almost anyone with a public IP address should be able to experiment with IPv6 thanks to the book's directions. Given that I operate multiple IPv6-capable systems in my lab, I was able to test some of the book's commands using link-local addressing (described in the text).

In brief, this is a must-have book for all network administrators. Even if you never intend to deploy IPv6, you should understand it as a professional technician. As a personal observation, I see many opportunities for intruders to exploit misconfigurations, poor coding, and various complexities in IPv6 (such as the huge variety of addresses assigned to single machines). IPv6 Network Administration will help get an IPv6 network running, at least to the point where administrators can begin becoming familiar with this new network protocol.

I bought this book to understand IPv6 so I know the meaning behind the various vendor-specific IPv6 knobs I will have to tweak in the near future, e.g. Cisco, Microsoft, *nix etc. I was misled by the "..Network Administration" in the title. Which, to me, usually represents a book with how-tos - and relevant rationale - pertaining to IPv6 on various platforms. A better title for this book is: "IPv6 - Planning Your Transition".

What I got instead was sort of a relaxed technical rambling from a couple of guys that clearly know IPv6 but don't know the next thing about how to teach others about it. (Think of two super-qualified IPv6 experts musing aloud about IPv6 while sitting in comfy leather chairs, wearing cardigans with elbow patches, beside a crackling fireplace, in a mountain cabin, in snowy weather.) I suffered through two whole chapters of the obligatory pros and cons of IPv4 at the beginning only to see IPv6's workings disposed off in a single chapter. Albeit with promises that we would "..get down to the juicy details later in Chapters 4 and 6." No such luck I'm afraid.

The book also suffers from a particularly acute case of let-me-tell-why-this-is-great that most engineers suffer from when asked to explain what they've come up with. Here's a quote from chapter 3's second paragraph to illustrate the point:

"When we talk about networking protocols in general it's important to understand the difference between specification and implementation."

Ummm, yes, if you are implementing the blasted thing. Not so much if you are a technical user of it. I knew I was in trouble after this point in the book.

So I excused myself, left the mountain cabin and took the cable car back into town. I hightailed it to the nearest bookstore and bought myself "Understanding IPv6, Second Edition" by Joseph Davies from Microsoft Press. Now here is a book that disposes off the obligatory IPv4 pros and cons in a couple of pages and gets to the meat of the matter in no time, i.e the actual workings of IPv6, its fields, their meanings and how they are used. As an added bonus, this book also does a great job of covering IPv6 transition options.

Buy "Understanding IPv6, Second Edition" and save your money. Or better, send me a postage paid book envelope and I'll send you my copy of "IPv6 Network Administration".

I'm reading both this book and _IPv6 Essentials, 2nd Ed._
Both of these books are good. but those interested in
IPv6 for OpenBSD will probably find IPv6 Essentials more
useful since this book does not mention OpenBSD at all, whereas the Essentials book
describes details of enabling optional ip6 features in OpenBSD (OpenBSD comes with
both ip4 and ip6 enabled by default) and even mentions OpenBSD
in the index.

Proofreading at OReilly is slipping. I have encountered
grammatical errors in the text that make me wonder if
English is the native language of the proofreader(s).

Also, note that O'Reilly appears to have severed
all email links to the rest of the world. The email addresses given in OReilly books no longer work,
(I tried to send this info to O'Reilly using the email address given in the book but the email bounced.)

I needed to learn IPv6 for my job and this book told me everything I need to know. It answered all my questions much faster and more efficiently than google searching.

Well worth the money in how much time it will save you.

Not much platform-specific stuff, but there is no way they could have covered all the platforms. I am working with VMS, AIX, Tru64 and HPUX, and you really can't expect every platform to be covered. Consult local documentation for platform specifics.

The first book I read on IPv6 was in 97. It posited that due to the immminent exhaustion of IPv4 addresses, IPv6 was just around the corner. Well it still is. IPv4 refuses to roll over and quietly die. So what happened?

There's a slight defensive tone to this book, in explaining the delay. The Preface and the first 3 chapters give a nicely nontechnical and readable assessment of developments in the intervening years. A good synopsis of the current status of the Internet usage and how we got to this point. It discusses various limitations of IPv4 and current routing methods based on it.

The remainder of the book is far more technical. Here, the readership is clearly someone like a network programmer or developer. Yes, you can deploy IPv6 on your network. But right now, globally, we have islands of IPv6 in a sea of IPv4.

Perhaps one good thing about the delayed rollout is that the elapsed years have led to far more stringent and comprehensive planning of various facets of IPv6. My favourite is the Mobile IPv6. Around 97, mobile computing in any form was miniscule. But its massive subsequent growth, with the promise of far more to come, gave rise to Mobile IPv6. Nice. So what are we waiting for?