BGP

Rating:
Summary: A terse yet informative discussion of BGP, mainly for pros
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: A terse yet informative discussion of BGP, mainly for pros
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: BGP Clearly defined
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: BGP Clearly defined
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent Introduction to BGP
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Clear, simple and straight to the point
Review: 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.