Book Review: Network Administration with FreeBSD 7
Posted by Ceri Davies Mon, 22 Sep 2008 20:31:00 GMT
I was approached some time ago by Packt Publishing with a request to review Network Administration with FreeBSD 7, a new book by Babak Farrokhi who is a FreeBSD committer among other things.
Right from the Preface it seemed clear that neither the author nor any of the editorial staff were native English speakers which, being the way that I am, made it very difficult to get into. Somewhere around chapter three, this improved drastically however, and I could finally manage to concentrate on the content. Which is good news, because the content is excellent.
Network administrators at any scale, from LAN to WAN, will find something useful. Routing protocols such as OSPF and BGP are covered, and there’s a good chapter on IPsec (and non-IPsec) tunnels which was directly useful to me personally while I was reading. Also welcome was information on IPv6 and a chapter on kernel tuning.
With multi-core systems such as Sun’s X4450 behemoth and the fine-grained locking in the network stack that FreeBSD enjoys now that GIANT is pretty much a distant memory, using FreeBSD on an off-the-shelf system to run hardcore bits of the network is practical, and this book works really well as a way to find out what the system is capable of and how to get started. Short chapters on getting familiar with FreeBSD and basic administration are also included, so there’s really no excuse not to take a look!
