Network Troubleshooting Tools

• Publisher: O'Reilly Media, Inc.
• Number Of Pages: 364
• Publication Date: 2001-08-09
• Sales Rank: 181139
• ISBN / ASIN: 059600186X
• EAN: 9780596001865
• Binding: Paperback
• Manufacturer: O'Reilly Media, Inc.
• Studio: O'Reilly Media, Inc.
• Average Rating: 4
• Total Reviews: 6

Hooray for Joseph Sloan, who has written Network Troubleshooting Tools. Sloan's book catalogs--and evaluates, with intelligent and carefully researched commentary--scores of free utilities that have been developed for monitoring, managing, and troubleshooting TCP/IP networks large and small. As such, it's a guide to the tools of the network administration trade. Without the concentrated wisdom that's found here, a network administrator might take years to stumble across all the fantastically useful utilities described in these pages, and waste all kinds of effort in the process. This book has found an excellent niche: a high-level technical book that earns its cover price by applying an author's experience and research to stuff that's freely available online, thus adding to readers' abilities to exploit the free stuff that's out there.

The organization Sloan has chosen is interesting and efficient. Chapters deal with categories of utilities, such as packet sniffers and device mapping. Chapters begin with descriptions of the general purpose of utilities in their category and describe features (and alternate means of providing them) in general terms. Then come sections on utilities, complete with commentaries on the strengths of each and command-line dumps of the utilities in use. As utilities often are best used together, the author does a good job of showing what steps to take when that needs to be done. There's no companion CD-ROM, but the URLs that link to the utilities appear--sorted alphabetically by the programs' names, in an appendix. --David Wall

Topics covered: The free utilities--mostly for Unix variants--that the author has found to be most useful in his work as an administrator and troubleshooter of TCP/IP networks. Utilities for route tracing, packet sniffing, device detection, performance measurement, and other work are covered here.

Over the years, thousands of tools have been developed for debugging TCP/IP networks. They range from very specialized tools that do one particular task, to generalized suites that do just about everything except replace bad Ethernet cables. Even better, many of them are absolutely free. There's only one problem: who has time to track them all down, sort through them for the best ones for a particular purpose, or figure out how to use them? Network Troubleshooting Tools does the work for you--by describing the best of the freely available tools for debugging and troubleshooting. You can start with a lesser-known version of ping that diagnoses connectivity problems, or take on a much more comprehensive program like MRTG for graphing traffic through network interfaces. There's tkined for mapping and automatically monitoring networks, and Ethereal for capturing packets and debugging low-level problems. This book isn't just about the tools available for troubleshooting common network problems. It also outlines a systematic approach to network troubleshooting: how to document your network so you know how it behaves under normal conditions, and how to think about problems when they arise, so you can solve them more effectively. The topics covered in this book include:

• Understanding your network
• Connectivity testing
• Evaluating the path between two network nodes
• Tools for capturing packets
• Tools for network discovery and mapping
• Tools for working with SNMP
• Performance monitoring
• Testing application layer protocols
• Software sources

OK

Eh, book was okay, but didn't really flip my burger. If you want a nice primer on some of the software tools and commands that you can use for monitoring system performance, this book would probably be just fine. Could have used more graphics. Good for reading at bedtime or in your time off, but just a little too wordy looking if you're in the field actually trying to get something done.

Pretty good

Could have covered more but was worth what you paid for. Not too shabby.

Good coverage; worthwhile

I bot this book for a friend who is a Jr-Mid level network (Unix) admin., who needed advice on this topic. This book does cover all the necessary topics. It's understandable, not overwhelming, and, as the TOC shows, covers lots of useful, relevant topics. It's also very practical. Worth buying!

Not worth the O'reilly name

This might be a decent reference book if it contained more detailed information. I am a junior in college and was required to read this book from cover to cover and it was extremely boring. Anything the author discussed could easily be learned from help files or a quick glance at the website the product came from. THe author uses the phrase 'this is beyond the scope of this book' just when he begins to talk about something you may not have already known.

In conclusion, this would probably be an excellent book for somebody just starting out using troubleshooting tools, but if you have had more then 6 months experience in the field you already know most of the topics he covers.

Top Notch!!

If you only have the time to read or money to buy one book on TCP/IP troubleshooting, then make it this one! Chapter 5 alone is worth it's weight in gold!

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