Forwarding Books

This is a very good book for people who want to learn the in depths of routing in general and cisco routing in particular. Protocol description is very well written going from beginner to advanced level. I recommend this to everybody who wants to make a networking career.

This is a corner-stone of Cisco routing engine explanation. It doesn't contain any braindump stuff like many books do. But it covers many topics: theoretical basis, IOS pseudo code explanations, configuration examples and trace/debugging methods. There are also many interesting details and gismos that I didn't find anywhere . It's very useful as a preparation guide -- you have to read this book if you do want to pass some sort of serious Cisco's exams (I mean CCNP or CCIE). So it's outstanding title (in other words -- it worth to spend 50+ bucks for it guyz!) :))

Btw, now I'm waiting for your next book. Why not? Will it be dedicated to MPLS or MLOSPF? Huh? :))

This book is not for the faint of heart.
Ever read a book and find a sentence that makes you say "man that one fact was worth the cash!". You get about one sentence like that every page in this text.

Example:
ip route 192.168.1.0 255.255.255.0 s0 172.17.1.33

I bought the book because I wanted to understand when, why, and how that command works. All of my questions were answered.

Since I'm not a programmer some of the explainations took me awhile to get, but worth it.

Gold.

The first time I heard this book is when I took the Internetworkexpert's online course. Brian McGahan recommended it. Becuase of its high customer rating, this book should have something worth studying. After reading through a couple of chapters, I feel it is a great book in IP Routing protocols.

This book presents concepts along with router outcome, so it's fairly easy to follow the author's logic in each different technology. This makes this book easy to digest. The way it presents how routing protocols work is very similar to Doyle's TCPIP vol.1. Yet, its editing style is more concise and it covers more in-depth materials in the IGP area.

Associated with Doyle's TCPIP and Parkhurst's OSPF, this book should be a required reading for CCIE RS candidates.

With my CCNA exam date staring straight at me, I decided to finally read my copy of Alex Zinin's 'Cisco IP Routing.' This book clearly exceeds the level of knowledge to pass Cisco's entry level certification. It is aimed more at CCNPs or CCIEs who need a deeper understanding of Cisco routing. Nevertheless, I found the book's explanations of certain subjects to be absolutely outstanding, even for a CCNA candidate. I recommend anyone wishing to learn Cisco router operations read 'Cisco IP Routing.'

This book seeks to deliver the 'why' as well as the 'how' of Cisco routing. It was published in late 2001 and uses IOS 12.1 as its reference platform. This IOS version is recent enough to meet my expectations, so don't fear that the book may not apply to more recent Cisco software and hardware. Remember that the 2600 series router was introduced in January 1999, and the modular 2600XM series arrived only in May 2002.

The first compelling aspect of 'Cisco IP Routing' is its exceptionally well-written and thorough explanations of various routing topics. Although my understanding of the subject was improved by reading Todd Lammle's Sybex CCNA books, Alex Zinin's approach assisted me immensely. For example, he helped me understand that classful addressing offers basic subnetting, which 'was used in the real world long before VLSM [Variable-Length Subnet Masks] appeared' (p. 22). He made it clear on p. 52 that 'when multiple matching routes are available to the same destination, routers choose the longest matching route to forward the packets.' This allows specifying a default route that is only used when more specific routes do not match a given destination.

Beyond very insightful routing discussions, Alex makes his point using a variety of methods. In some cases he presents tables that compare protocols. Elsewhere he uses diagrams or figures. Throughout the book he demonstrates syntax and configuration, along with debugging messages showing how protocols work in real life. His innovative use of 'pseudo-code' shows how Cisco might represent protocol information within IOS itself. In many chapters he presents and answers frequently asked questions. These help to dispel myths readers may have concerning Cisco routers.

I cannot complain about any real aspect of this book. As a minor point, Alex's thorough examinations of routing packet headers should have been augmented by real packet traces. I would like to see a companion volume introduce topics like spanning tree, BGP, and other routing and switching issues. Readers looking for such coverage now might like Radia Perlman's 'Interconnections, 2nd Ed' and Iljitsch van Beijnum's 'BGP.'

If you want to truly learn what your Cisco router does when it makes forwarding decisions, you must read 'Cisco IP Routing.' I have not seen any other books so powerfully expose the inner workings of these critical systems.

This small guide and text book was primarily written and also edited by Derek Downs, whom I was fortunate to work with at Thomas Meadows and Company in the early eighties.

Along with another Meadows director, George Bristow, they more or less devised the Standard Trading Conditions used by most freight forwarders at that time.

It really was the only book of its kind that contained a wide-ranging overview of the nuts and bolts of the cargo industry.

When I arrived as a young apprentice, Derek Downs was an elder of the tribe who occupied his office like a consultant in Harley Street or a head of chambers in Chancery Lane.

He oozed the wisdom of age and was kindly, inspiring and indulgent. It was hard to believe that somebody I knew personally could be behind such a well thought out and well put together book, which for many years had no equal.

If you must tackle and tame Sendmail, YOU MUST OWN THIS BOOK! Without it sendmail is Greek..

Highlights

* Very Clear, Consice and easy to understand.
* Examples are good and to the point.
* Explains setup, running and Admin in depth.

Ok! Face it, if you are into sendmail and want a good reference, do you have any other choice ??

Luckily, Allman and Costales have done a wonderful job in creating this book.

Santy

... were afraid to ask!

If you want or have to work with sendmail the ubiquitous SMTP server written by Eric Allman et. al. then this is the book for you. I have been an Unix system administrator for 15+ years and I still run to this book when I have to do anything fancy with sendmail.

Every system administrator worth their salt has to munge the sendmail.cf file at least once in their career. This book will at least point you in the right direction.

...I've owned both v1 and v2 of this book, and have continually been frustrated by both.

Big problems here are that the book isn't tremendously helpful for learning - more of a reference, and that it is at least four years out of date, which is a long time considering what's happened with the Internet since then....

And still have 3 issues.

I bought this book thinking it would help a relatively unexperienced administrator figure out how to work with sendmail. Unfortunately this book does not give the type guidance that I need. There is basically no "how to" section. I was able to find one of the problems I am having stated in the book, with absolutely no resolution to it listed. This book was a waste of my companys money.

I have to disagree that this is an introductory book to Sendmail. Neither is it for the advanced learner. For this, you might as well go for O'Reilly's Sendmail, The Definitive Guide.

"Sendmail : Theory and Practice" is a great introduction for anyone who has to maintain a UNIX mailserver. Although a bit dated (some of the suggested utilities are quite dated and have been superceded), the fundamentals are sound, and still very applicable.

If you're a beginning sendmail administrator, read this book before reading the "Bat" book (O'Reilly's Sendmail in a Nutshell). If you're more experienced, use it as a companion. And if you're a Guru, well...write another Sendmail book.

The first edition of this book was an excellent general introduction, but did not cover much in the way of more modern sendmail features (such as using m4 to "compile" sendmail.cf files from the sendmail.mc "source"). Because of the longer lead time in the publishing of that book, some parts were already outdated before it was published.

This updated edition addresses many of these shortcomings, while still being an excellent high-level introductory text.

This book is an excellent introduction to the program "sendmail", co-authored by Paul Vixie who wrote what was known as "King James Sendmail", which was based on the original code from Eric Allman plus all the available patches he could find.

This book isn't a great reference to have on the shelf, but you cannot find a better introductory text. This is an excellent book to give to your boss, if they demand to understand more about what you do in terms of managing the mail servers, etc....

However, if you're going to be doing this job on a daily basis, then you also need the book _sendmail_ by Bryan Costales, published by O'Reilly & Assoc.

Costales is an absolutely unbeatable reference book on sendmail, but isn't as good as an introductory text, if only due to its exhaustive completeness (over a thousand pages).

I disagree that this book is a good introduction to sendmail. It does not cover the basic options well, and very quickly goes off the deep end of the sendmail.cf file. It is probably a very good introduction to the advanced sendmail.cf programming that most people will never need to do.

It barely mentions how to create sendmail.cf using the m4 macro processor. It doesn't cover virtual hosting well, but spends pages and pages on uucp and decnet mail. And ,it is unix-centric to the point of assuming that all users will be on unix boxes with their own properly configured hostname and sendmail, rather than on DHCPed PCs down the hall (which seems to be the current situation).

All in all, this book told me little of nothing about the sendmail tasks I have to accomplish and way too much about stuff I should never have to touch.

A good book to introduce you to the foundation of packet forwarding for Cisco devices to help with faster troubleshooting and analysis.

Normally a book review shouldn't start with a warning, well this one does: This book is not for everyone. There's a huge number of Cisco books available, many of them dealing with the same technology (routing, switching), some more in-depth than others, and some dedicated to a specific technology.

Some people don't know that many packets in a router are switched from an input interface to an output interface. This means that the main CPU of a router is not directly, or is less, involved in the forwarding of a packet. Initially all packets traversing a router were process switched, this had some serious performance issues. So Cisco came up with the idea to cache information to the interface processors. This was the birth of fast switching.

Somewhere in the 90's Cisco realized that Fast Switching had its limitations, and a new switching technology was developed which led to CEF (Cisco Express Forwarding). This has become the default switching method in almost all Cisco routers. This book deals with this exclusively.

The book has two parts, one dealing with understanding, configuring and troubleshooting (4 chapters), and the second part (3 chapters) has some CEF case studies.

Chapter 1 deals mainly with the architecture of a router and has some very detailed information about how memory, buffers and interfaces relate to each other.
Chapters 2 and 3 deal with understanding of and enhancements to the original CEF implementations. These two chapters have many show commands to clarify CEF.
Chapter 4 has an IP connectivity troubleshooting example in which CEF can help you to understand the problem, an excellent chapter.
Chapter 5 describes CEF on a Cat6500, which is hardware based, and the differences when troubleshooting CEF on a Cat6500.
Chapter 6 is all about load sharing with CEF. This, for me, is the best chapter of this book. It gives you real world configurations and problems and shows how CEF plays a role in load sharing. Excellent!
Chapter 7 deals with CEF in an MPLS VPN environment. Together with chapter 6 it provides really useful information; information you can apply directly in your network.

In the beginning I mentioned that this book is not for everyone - let me clarify that.

Most people know how to drive a car: use the key to start the engine and off you go, sometimes you have to fill it up. For most people this is enough. Then there are people who understand some of the lights on the dashboard and how to take action on these. But only a few people really understand how a car works, and are capable of dealing with any mechanical problem that might occur.

In the same manner, this book will provide the insight required to understand how CEF truly works inside Cisco's routers and switches.

This book can promote you to the elite; it is the last piece of the puzzle that will tell exactly how packets are moved inside a router.

In this 3rd book in the DKA series, Dan Kearny Associates� very existence is threatened when Dan is served with papers accusing the company of fraud and, if found to be true, could see him lose his licence. DKA is a company of private investigators who specialise in car repossessions and chasing down skip traces. This time, they will be using their skills on their own company. The events surrounding the supposed fraud occurred over a year previously and all employees involved have since moved on: 1 has died and the others quit or were fired. In order to save their business, two of the investigators, Larry Ballard and Bart Heslip have to track down the former employees who may be able to provide the evidence that will prove DKA�s innocence.

The story has two focal points running concurrently. The first is the hearing, which provides the drama and the second is on the investigation performed by Ballard and Heslip, which provides the action. The progress of the hearing is actually the stopwatch indicating how much time the DKA investigators have to find their potential witnesses.

The DKA books provide all the necessary ingredients that fans of PI books would be looking for, but it is also enhanced by the fact that the agency is much larger than a 1 or 2 man business and so, there are plenty of opportunities for elaborate plans involving multiple players to be carried out.

Adam Espinosa arrives in San Francisco with a female companion on a flight from Mexico City. After emptying the contents of a safe deposit box, he is murdered. At the time of the killing Kathy Onoda is receiving a delinquent auto payment from Kasimir Pivarski at the DKA office.

Dan Kearny is served a notice of complaint by the state licensing board regarding DKA's handling of the payment. Kathy Onoda dies unexpectedly of a massive blood clot leaving Kearny without a witness to the transaction. Kearny sends agents scurrying to find another witness in order to save his license.

The license hearing threads its way throughout the book. Bart Heslip provides most of the heroics. GONE, NO FORWARDING is an entertaining mystery novel but not the very best of the successful DKA series.

This is really a quick reference guide to the full Sendmail book that is over 1000 pages. This book is not intended to teach you to administrator Sendmail, it is for someone familiar with the product already and needs a little help with commands/configuration options.

This is the quick reference guide to the larger tome _sendmail_ by Bryan Costales, et al. If you are an experienced Internet mail system administrator, you may be able to largely get by with using just this book, since it highlights the parts of the larger book that you would be most likely to use on a regular basis. However, if you need to go into any detail, of course you would also need the bigger book.

I have multiple copies of this book, and try to always have at least one copy that I carry around with me most anywhere -- you never know when you might run into a problem or be asked a related question to which you do not remember the answer off-the-top of your head, but which would be answered very quickly by thumbing through the quick reference.

I also have multiple copies of the bigger book, one at home, one at work, etc..., but you really don't want to carry such a monster volume around with you everywhere. However, you can do just that with this quick reference.

The most knowledgeable and experienced system administrators don't pretend to try to remember everything. What we do know is where to find the answers, and how to find them quickly. This is why we have whole bookshelves full of O'Reilly books like this.

Even Eric Allman and Bryan Costales don't remember every little detail about sendmail (the program) or about the various books, which is why they also keep multiple copies of these sorts of things.

This book is written for version 8.8 of sendmail. Sendmail went through some major changes with version 8.9 and these are not covered in this book. Also, the current version of Sendmail is 8.12.X.

Maybe the O'Reilly people should consider an update!

I wasn't very happy with this book. It reads like a technical manual. Not very intuitive and is probably useful if you are already compitent with sendmail. If you are already compitent, what's the point? Was difficult to find even the simplest details on how to do something. Impossible to read cover to cover. Like reading an encrypted phone book.

Major changes in v8.10, including a much easier interface to the various RBL's. It is a good book, but time for an update. If you still have v8.9.3 in your shop, you can admin with this book though.

The only reason I gave this book 2 stars is because it has a good section on starting a mail drop/fowarding business. The book offers no information that you couldn't get out of a Post Office or Mail boxes etc. pamphlet. It tells you what you can use a mail drop for, but not how to set one up outside of using a P.O box or CMRA. There is no privacy in using a P.O box or CMRA box unless you use a fake ID or someone elses box.

this book is very importent to me

If you know nothing about mail drops then this book might get you started or if you want to begin your own mail service then buy this book. Chapters ramble away from the main topic and many pages are wasted in appendix that you will never use. Also, the book is now out of date due to recent changes in the law for US mail services.