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Cisco IP routing [Book Review]

Article  in  IEEE Network · April 2002

DOI: 10.1109/MNET.2002.993212 · Source: IEEE Xplore

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 El NEW BOOKS and MULTIMEDIA/Edited by Ioanis Nikolaidis

The New Books and Multimedia column contains brief reviews of new books in the Cisco IP Routing
computer communications field. Each review includes a highly abstracted descrip-
Alex Zinin, 2002, Addison-Wesley,
tion of the contents, relying on the publisher’s descriptive materials, minus adver-
ISBN 0-201 -60473-6, 635 pages,
tising superlatives, and checked for accuracy against a copy of the book. The
hardcover.
reviews also comment on the structure and the target audience of each book.
Publishers wishing to have their books listed in this manner should send copies What Zinin’s book achieves that the
and appropriate advertising materials to Ioanis Nikolaidis at the address below, majority of books on vendor-oriented
with an indication that books are intended for the IEEE Network New Books and (and Cisco in particular) routing fail to
Multimedia column. Appropriate books will be reviewed in the column. capture is the description of what goes
Ioanis Nikolaidis on inside an actual router, in terms of
Computing Science Department, the algorithms and data structures used.
University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada T6G 2E8 Given the complicated nature of most
routing algorithms and relevant configu-
ration information, understanding the
Stream Contrcd Transmission present the mechanism for future exten- principle of operation does not imply a
sions, a proposed API (essentially a good understanding of what a specific
Profocol, A Reference Guide socket-based one, including some not sequence of commands (in the case of
Randall R. Stewart and Qiaobing Xie, yet finalized socket option flags), and Cisco, the 10s commands) will produce
2002, Addison-Wesley, ISBN 0-20 1- the SCTP Stream feature through cer- as results or side-effects. Compounding
7 2 1 86-4, 35 1 pages., hardcover, tain example applications (ftp-like the problem is the fact that several rout-
CD-ROM included transfer, call control, Web browser). ing algorithms may be used on a single
The book is complemented by a CD- router, their interaction and correspon-
The Stream Control Transmission Proto- ROM providing an open source SCTP dence being anything but trivial. Expla-
col (SCTP) is another transport layer reference implementation. nation of the internals is achieved in
protocol for IP, presented in RFC 2960.
SCTP’s particular feature is the conser-
vation of messa,ge boundaries (as
opposed to TCP’s lack of such a feature). EDITOR’S CHOICE
SCTP is motivated by the inconveniences Web Caching and Replication
of TCP’s ordered byte stream service
model. For example, contrary to TCP, Michael Rabinovich and Oliver Spatscheck, 2002, Addison-Wesley, ISBN 0-
SCTP allows reordering of the messages, 201-61570-3, 361 pages, softcover.
as long as integrity of the messages is Rabinovich and Spatscheck remind us that not only human users, but also an
maintained. Furthermore, the idea of increasing number of computer applications rely on the Web, demanding even
multihomed IP hosts (as exhibited by better performance from its services. Even if we ignore such computer applica-
IPv6) is not exploited by TCP, and TCP tions, the idea of even better Web use experience is pushing the envelope of per-
is also vulnerable to certain denial of ser- formance. Caching and replication are two widely used techniques for improving
vice attacks. SCTP essentially provides a performance in such client-server environments. These particular techniques gave
solution to these issues, while maintain- rise to new industries (equipment and services alike), and a good understanding,
ing the same congestion control logic as of what is achievable and why, becomes necessary for anyone wishing to purchase
TCP. The book is geared to protocol and integrate equipment and services into their Web infrastructure. The book
developers and implementers, but can be serves the purpose of properly calibrating the expectations from these two techniques.
read by anyone curious to know of The intended audience spans IT professionalslooking at improvingtheir own installed
SCTP’s features or wishing to discover infrastructure to graduate students and, in general, researchers in the area.
limitations of TCP and how they can be Indeed, the book provides a wide collection of research results, summarized and struc-
solved. It is not surprising that a chapter tured in concise fashion. It is demonstrated how even the last drop of perfor-
is dedicated to comparing and contrast- mance can be squeezed. For example, the oxymoron in the title “Caching the
ing TCP and SCTP. If we factor out the Uncacheable” illustrates how cookies (and other stateful information) and
TCP vs. SCTP chapter and the intro- dynamic content can be exploited. The book is organized in fiveerts; the first is,
ductory (mostly terminology) chapters, predictably, an introduction to some essential protocols (IP, TCP, and HTTP).
what is left is a detailed, down to the The description of HTTP is focused on extensions relevant to caching (conditional
last bit, description of SCTP. People requests, request redirection, cache-control header, cookies, expanded object
who enjoy understanding the low-level identifiers, learning of proxy chains).The part ends by reviewing resultsin measurement
details of protocols, from headers to and evaluation of object sizes, types, and popularity, arguing the general difficulty
underlying state machines, will certainly of staging a single representative experiment that can have globally valid results.
enjoy such detailed coverage. In the Thenexttwopartscoverthetwokeytopicsofthebooktitle. Cachingspanssevenchap-
order presented, the topics are: packet ters, covering reasonable expectations, deployment techniques (transparent, non-
formats and header information, setting transparent), cooperative proxy caching, cache consistency, replacement policies,
up SCTP associations (and underlying prefetching, and caching the uncacheable (dynamic content). The part on replica-
states), the data transfer stage (what are tion covers mechanisms for request distribution and how to implement them
called DATA chunkcs), the congestion (DNS-based, anycast, distributed file systems, redirection by applets and HTTP,
control mechanism (providing precise L7 switches), specialized content delivery networks (CDNs), and server selection
implementation guidelines), failure schemes. It is to be commended that the book ends with a review of the more
detection and recovery, dealing with exotic options and less established trends, such as transcoding, the Internet Con-
out-of-the-blue (OOTB) packets, and tent Adaptation Protocol (ICAP),watermarking, cooperative CDN, and forward prox-
closing/terminating a n association ies.
(graceful or not). Additional chapters

A IEEE Network March/April2002

 2# NEW BOOKS and MULTIMEDIA
/
this book by providing the (C-like) pseu-
docode of what essentially happ’ens
behind the scenes when certain c m-
mands are invoked (we are warned not
t
to expect that the pseudocode is a qne-
to-one reflection of the actual Ci co
source code, but rather a summariz d
idea of the control flow). That beidg
l+
said, understanding the internals boil
down to understanding the pseudocode,
possibly alienating some readers n t
keen on reading code. Nevertheless, one sl’
can approach the pseudocode on an hs
needed basis, when the behavior of c Im-
mands is not exactly as intuitive as Xne
might expect. The reader is assumed to
be familiar with networking, but a short
review of IP addressing and its relation
to routing is nevertheless provided in the
introduction. A chapter describes the
routing information organization and
management inside Cisco routers, fol-
lowed by a chapter that describes the IP
forwarding process options present in
Cisco routers: fast, optimum, distributed,
NetFlow, and Cisco Express forwarding.
After the internal mechanisms and for-
warding options come the chapters on
actual routing protocols: static routing,
dynamic routing, distance vector proto-
cols (RIP and IGRP), and link state pro-
tocols (OSPF and IS-IS). A separate
chapter describes Enhanced IGRP,
Cisco’s proprietary protocol. The style is
geared toward answering specific ques-
tions as to why things work in a particu-
lar way, instead of just how. Consistent
with the book’s scope, each chapter
includes several examples and is followed
by a Q-and-A section of the most fre-
quently asked questions.
Internet and lntranet Sewrib
2nd Edition
Rolf Opplinger, 2002, Artech House,
ISBN 1-58053-166-0, 403 pages,
hardcover.
Rolf Opplinger’s book is an attempt to
present security in networks (intra- and
internets) in a unified fashion. For a
long part of the book, networking and
cryptography are presented separately,
coming together in the second half
(“Communications Security”). The con-
tents cover not just cryptographic
aspects of security but also general-pur-
pose security mechanisms that can be
used to enhance security, such as packet
filtering and firewalling. The first part
lays the foundations, including terminol-
ogy, basics of TCPIIP, types and nature
of attacks, the OS1 security architecture,
and a brief review of cryptographic
techniques followed by authentication
and key distribution techniques. Specifi-
IEEE Network March/April2002
View publication stats
li
cally the cryptographic techniques
include DES, 3DES, IDEA, SAFER,
Blowfish, CAST-128, RC2, RC4, RC5,
RC6, AES, RSA, Diffie-Hellman, EIGa-
mal, DSS, ECC, digital envelopes, key
protection, and pseudorandom
sequences, as well as certain legal issues.
The reader should be warned that the
P presentation of cryptographic techniques
I .
is severely condensed (the topics listed
above take less than 28 pages of the
book); if interested in the properties and
limitations of a scheme, instead of just its
application, the reader is advised to seek
other sources of information. From the
remaining parts, the second is devoted to
firewalls: packet filtering, SOCKS, appli-
cation-level gateways, configuration of
firewalls, and in gcneral the architectural
elements of a potentially secured net-
work. The communications part pays
attention to a handful of specific proto-
cols at different layers of the protocol
stack, explaining their principles of oper-
ation. These include MS-PPTP, IPsec,
SKIP, IDE, SSL, TLS, Kerberos,
SESAME, PGP, and SWIME. The book
ends with a discussion of PKI (certifi-
cates and certificate authorities), and a
short overview of electronic commerce,
risk management policies and principles.
Overall, the book is written for an audi-
ence without necessarily a significant
technical background who wish to quick-
ly rcview a broad introduction to the
available techniques and protocols of
network security.
If‘ SANS,A Guide to iSCSI/
iFCP, and FCIP, Protoco/s for
Storage Area Networks
Tom Clark, 2002, Addison-Wesley,
ISBN 0-201-75277-8, 288 pages, soft-
cover.
The objective of storage area networks
(SANs) is to produce logical storage
units that are in fact scalable collections
of storage devices over a network.
While storage devices are well appreci-
ated as scalable in terms of capacity at a
nearly exponential rate, the extent to
which a specific network technology is
to be uscd and its shortcomings, in
terms of scalability, are still an issue for
research and development. One prevail-
ing school of thought advocates the use
of IP as the network technology of
choice. The deployment of SANs over
IP requires the solution to a plethora of
problems because of the need of a lega-
cy general-purpose internetworking pro-
tocol (IP) to efficiently support
relatively recent protocols, of special-
ized nature (SCSI, Fibre Channel),
some not even intended for WAN
deployment. Part of the problem is
purely the syntactical aspect of such
protocols (performance being the other
one) that allow, for example, SCSI com-
mands to be conveyed via IP. To this
extent, the book presents the SCSI
Architecture Model (SAM-2), and SCSI
architecture in general (Chapter 4)
which is key to understanding the rest.
A sequence of chapters ( 5 , 6, and 7 )
provide a review of IP, UDP, and TCP
for those unfamiliar with networking.
The rest of the book centers around
IETF’s Fibre Channel over IP (FCIP),
Internet Fibre Channel Protocol
(iFCP), and Internet SCSI (iSCSI).
These protocols are described in detail,
and they correspond to, respectively, FC
extensions to connect remote FC SANS
via IP (FCIP), mapping between IP and
FC end nodes (iFCP), and replacement
of FC and devices with native IP storage
devices (iSCSI). Another important fac-
tor of IP SANs, especially in larger
installations, is their management; this is
covered in Chapter 9 through presenta-
tion of the Internet Storage Name Server
(iSNS) protocol. To complete the pre-
sentation, security and quality of service
of S A N S are presented, even though they
are not as closely related to SANs alone
per se, but rather to IP security and QoS.
Arguments to convince the reader of the
value of the application potential of
SANs can be found in Chapter 13, from
obvious choices (backup) to perfor-
mance-driven applications (server clus-
tering and massive data distribution).
Appendices provide information about
the Storage Networking Industry Associ- ‘
ation (SNIA) and IP storage (and rela’t-
ed) vendors.
java.rmi The Remote Method
Invocation Guide
Esmond Pitt and Kathleen McNiff,
2001, Addison-Wesley, ISBN 0-201-
70043-3, 284 pages, softcover.
The idea of distributed programming
across heterogeneous CPUs, OSs, lan-
guages, and data formats has galva-
nized researchers and software
developers alike, producing, for exam-
ple, RPC and CORBA. The emergence
of Java as a universal programming
language led, naturally, to its use as a
step toward simplifying distributed sys-
tems programming. The bulk of func-
tionality in support of distributed
applications under Java is known as the
Remote Method Invocation ( R M I )
API. RMI is already quite popular in
the development of applications, but
the range of information necessary
(which goes beyond the Java RMI doc-
~
5