Linux Routers: A Primer for Network Administrators

News! The second edition of Linux Routers is scheduled to be published on 2002/05/25. Prentice Hall was gracious enough to give me the go ahead to update it for the 2.4 kernel, and I took advantage of the opportunity to add material on IPv6, IPsec VPNs, GRE tunneling, OSPF and traffic-shaping.

My book, Linux Routers: A Primer for Network Administrators is out there hopefully making itself useful for network administrators, folks with cable modems and DSL, and generally anyone who expects more out of their router than an expensive black box. If you'd like to purchase it and don't want to pay too much for a copy, try ordering it directly from Pearson Education .

If you are visiting this page because you own the book, let me thank you for purchasing it, and tell you right away that I value your feedback. This page has some information that supplements the book, including errata and sample code.

If you are considering purchasing the book, please check out reviews from those who have read the book, and feel free to drop me an email with your questions. Although I don't always have time to answer every ``how do I do X'' question, I typically can at least point you in the right direction.

Linux Router Resources

• Sangoma has accumulated and posted a veritable wealth of useful information and tips to their website. For example, ever need pinouts for a couple of T1 access routers in a back-to-back configuration?
• Donald Becker has done the Linux community a great service by providing Ethernet network drivers and NIC diagnostic programs to Linux for as long as I can remember. If you're getting slow network response out of your 100baseT card (especially if you're tied to a Cisco switch - the 5309 we use at work is notorious for not autonegotiating correctly), you'll want to get a copy of mii-diag and force your card into a given mode. See http://www.scyld.com/diag/ for diagnotics and http://www.scyld.com/network/ for drivers.
  

It would inappropriate to let you believe that the final typesetting was done by me, it wasn't. Lori Hughes of Freelance Publishing Services provided the LaTeX wizardry to take my very humble stab at typesetting and turn it into a polished final product. It is also worth mention that Prentice Hall is supportive enough to let me produce the book using my tools of choice and to respect the fact that I wish to maintain control of the book source files between editions.

If you're considering a large publishing project, I highly recommend that you take a look at LaTeX and various other markup languages before you go barrelling down the path of WYSIWYG. It's nice being able to write using the editor of your choice and still do things like modify a certain type of markup tag by running your source through sed. I find it motivational to be able to produce PDFs on a daily basis, and as like as not, you may find need during the course of writing to produce a web version of your book. latex2html does a fairly nice job of this. Oh yeah, all of this software is free, both to use and modify... :)

Translations

• Linux Routers (first edition) in Japanese
• There is a Chinese translation of the first edition, although I haven't been able to find a copy of it in the wild.
• The Chinese translation of the second edition (ISBN: 986-7727-03-7) was released in February of 2003. You should be able to find out more information about it at http://www.pearsoned.com.tw
• The second edition has been translated into Spanish (ISBN: 84-205-3646-6) and should be available as of August 2004.

Reviews of Linux Routers:

• The Sheffield Linux User's Group
• Unix Review, 2000/11/27
• Slashdot, 2000/11/01
• Fatbrain
• Amazon.com
• Bookpool.com (which is quite negative indeed!)
• Linux Journal, 2001/11/28.

• BCR published an article on Linux-based VoiceXML IVR in their August 2004 issue. Once again, the material is more Linux advocacy for corporate shops.
• SearchEnterpriseLinux.com published a series of articles from an interview in July of 2003. The individual articles can be found at:
  • Part 1
  • Part 2
  • Part 3
  • Dos and Don'ts
• BCR is having me back for an article in their March 2002 issue. The material is about Linux adoption in corporate IT shops.
• A segment I wrote back in December of 2000 about Linux as a network infrastucture component has found its way into the recently published Enterprise Networking: Multilayer Switching & Applications, edited by Vasilis Theoharakis and Dimitrios Serpanos. The book is definitely not a hands-on technical book, but targeted more at middle-level managers who would like to learn about the technologies available in this area.
• http://InformIT.com/ had me sit in as a ``featured expert'' at in January of 2001. There are a couple of pro-Linux rants and some information about library dependencies and package building there, but you have to register with the site to view them.
• BCR published an article I wrote about Linux in the network in their January/2000 issue. They were kind enough to put it out on the web at http://www.bcr.com/bcrmag/2000/01/p28.asp.
• Linux WAN Routers is the article that started it all. Published in Linux Journal back in July of 1998, this article led to working with Prentice Hall on the book project.