BGP (Paperback)

~ Iljitsch Van Beijnum (Author)
Key Phrases: traffic engineering, routing registry, physical design considerations, Local Preference, Getting Started, Internet Exchange (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) governs the exchange of routing information among autonomous networks, ensuring that packets can get from point A to point B regardless of most possible problems. BGP explores the capabilities and limitations of this exquisitely important protocol with an eye to teaching network engineers how to build systems that are faster, less costly, and more survivable than ever before. It's a great guide for those responsible for managing the interfaces between large networks and their neighbors, and a valuable aid for people preparing for their Cisco Certified Network Professional (CCNP) tests or other advanced certifications.

Authors of protocol-centric books risk becoming bogged down in bits. Iljitsch van Beijnum avoids overwhelming his readers with packet diagrams and message analysis, choosing instead to focus on how routers use BGP to efficiently use available connections (he focuses on Cisco Systems routers in his configuration examples, but the concepts apply universally). He also pays attention--and these sections are among the book's best--to strategies for coping with problems such as cable cuts and Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. He understands, and conveys to his readers through network diagrams, configuration listings, and diagnostic traces, that BGP is a tool for managing the points at which networks intersect. --David Wall

Topics covered: Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), particularly as configured under Cisco Internetwork Operating System (IOS), and its means of describing routes across independently managed networks. Sections deal with addressing, bandwidth provisioning, traffic engineering, system monitoring, selecting and interconnecting with Internet Service Providers (ISPs), and troubleshooting.

Product Description

Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is the routing protocol used to exchange routing information across the Internet. It makes it possible for ISPs to connect to each other and for end-users to connect to more than one ISP. BGP is the only protocol that is designed to deal with a network of the Internet's size, and the only protocol that can deal well with having multiple connections to unrelated routing domains. This book is a guide to all aspects of BGP: the protocol, its configuration and operation in an Internet environment, and how to troubleshoot it. The book also describes how to secure BGP, and how BGP can be used as a tool in combating Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. Although the examples throughout this book are for Cisco routers, the techniques discussed can be applied to any BGP-capable router. BGP is for anyone interested in creating reliable connectivity to the Internet.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 304 pages
• Publisher: O'Reilly Media; 1 edition (September 11, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0596002548
• ISBN-13: 978-0596002541
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.9 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #380,095 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars BGP Clearly defined, November 19, 2002

By	Rob Cameron (Detroit, MI USA) - See all my reviews

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.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Excellent Introduction to BGP, April 8, 2004

By	Eric Dorland (Canada) - See all my reviews

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.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars With this book - learning BGP has never been easier, May 14, 2007

By	Wayne W. Leung "Wayner 2.0" (Los Angeles, CA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.