Networking

DNSSEC Mastery, 2nd Edition

DNS

The world’s most successful distributed database—and the most naïve.

The Domain Name System is one of the Internet’s oldest protocols, designed for a network without hostile users. Intruders targeting a network start by investigating their DNS. DNS Security Extensions, or DNSSEC, hardens DNS and brings it into the 21st century. Learning DNSSEC required wading through years of obsolete tutorials, dead ends, and inscrutable standards.

Until now.

This new edition of DNSSEC Mastery will have DNS administrators deploying DNSSEC with industry-standard software in hours instead of weeks. You will:

• Understand what DNSSEC provides
• Configure your servers to resist attack
• Verify your environment supports modern DNS
• Debug DNSSEC and the Chain of Trust
• Sign your zones and attach them to the Chain of Trust
• Conceal zone data with NSEC3
• Automate DNSSEC maintenance
• Roll over keys to maintain integrity
• Implement DNSSEC on private networks
• Securely distribute security-critical information via DNS

And more! DNSSEC Mastery transforms DNS from a headache to a solution.

TLS Mastery

SNMP Mastery

It’s baroque. It’s arcane. And it’s everywhere.

SNMP is one of those system management skills that people acquire by experience, stumbling through one horrid implementation after another and counting their knowledge by their scars. SNMP Mastery is your guide to the secret landscape of one of computing’s most mysterious tools.

You will understand:

• What makes SNMP simple
• When to use SNMP, and when not to
• How to use SNMP securely
• Objects, MIBs, and OIDs
• to use the net-snmp management toolkit
• SNMPv3
• efficient queries
• debugging
• proxies, SMUX, and AgentX
• View-based Access Control Model (VACM)
• extending the net-snmp agent
• logging, traps, and notifications

The Networknomicon, or SNMP Mastery

The Simple Network Management Protocol, SNMP, empowers you to invoke ancient standards from the void. SNMP exposes the secrets of your network and servers, and–if you’re careless–reconfigures them into unspeakable nightmares. It exposes your inadequate brain to the vast alien dimensions underlying modern computing.

SNMP is authentic dark magic.

Abdul Alhazred’s infamously rumored Networknomicon, or SNMP Mastery, has long been blamed for the Spanish Inquisition, the Second World War, and Cleveland. While nuclear “testing” was thought to have eradicated all copies of the manuscript, an astute student with a baggy shirt and considerable mob debts recently liberated one tattered survivor from the Miskatonic University Library of Computer Science.

Tilted Windmill Press is pleased to present this facsimile edition, freshly translated from Alien Syntax Notation.1 into English by dubiously acclaimed and unquestionably foolhardy author Michael W. Lucas.

The publisher is not responsible for extradimensional incursion, overloaded monitoring systems, bouts of madness, saltwater in servers, nonexistent colors, rats in the walls of crumbling ancient data centers, triangles with too many degrees, unparseable MIB files, sojourns out of Time and Space, self-medication, self-trepanation, self-destruction, Lego-induced foot trauma, or any other harm, transformation, or impact of any sort, that might be plausibly or implausibly ascribed to this tome.

Networking for System Administrators

Stop waiting for the network team!

If basic TCP/IP was hard, network administrators couldn’t do it. Servers give sysadmins incredible visibility into the network—once they know how to unlock it.

Most sysadmins don’t need to understand window scaling, or the differences between IPv4 and IPv6 echo requests, or other intricacies of the TCP/IP protocols. You need only enough to deploy your own applications and get easy support from the network team.

This book teaches you:

A systems administrator doesn’t need to know the innards of TCP/IP, but knowing enough to diagnose your own network issues transforms a good sysadmin into a great one.

Fungi are among the most networked creatures in the world. If a mushroom can do it, so can you!

Network Flow Analysis

Blaming the network is easy. It’s traditional. And it’s (usually) wrong.

Servers have log files, performance monitors, and other tools to assess and record system and application behavior. Traditional network devices have one LED on each port, and if you’re lucky the LED blinks when somehing happens. Maybe you have tools to tell you how busy an interface is, but generally a network device is an unreadable black box. Network Flow Analysis opens the black box, demonstrating how to use the freely-available flow-tools software and the capabilities of your existing hardware to assess, analyze, and debug your network.

A network administrator’s abilities are as good as his awareness of his network. Flow analysis is the industry-standard method of collecting and recording network traffic. Flow analysis lets you see what types of traffic passed between hosts, without having to reproduce the problem.

Flow export and analysis transforms network administration from a stomach-churning mix of guesswork, issue reproduction, and head-scratching to a fact-based science that lets you focus on resolving problems at their source.

Network administrators: When a problem is yours, own it. When a problem isn’t yours, prove it.

• Stop asking your users to reproduce problems
• Leverage the capabilities of your existing hardware
• Identify network, server, router, and firewall problems before they become critical
• Find defective and misconfigured software
• Has anyone accessed that old server in the last day, month, or year? Find out.
• Quickly find virus-spewing machines — even on a global network, even when the culprit is on a different continent
• Is it a network problem, or is it a server problem that looks like a network problem?
• Automatically produce graphs suited for your environment, and provide friendly Web-based interfaces to your customers

Cisco Routers for the Desperate, 2nd edition

It’s 3AM. Do you know why your router is on fire?

Cisco routers are the industry standard, to which all other routers are compared. Whether you love them or hate them, you still must live with them. While they’re generally robust and reliable, when a Cisco router breaks someone needs to fix it. If you’re in IT, when they say someone they mean you.

This book provides a brief introduction to Cisco routers, with a tight focus on what you need to know to get the router up and working in the shortest amount of time. Reading this book once will give you the knowledge on how your router and internet circuit work. Leaving it on top of the router for reference during a crisis will give you a step-by-step guide to troubleshooting when things go wrong.

Once you understand routers, managing switches isn’t much harder. This 2nd Edition will help you upgrade, manage, and operate Cisco switching hardware, from the tiny 12-port models to the monster backbone devices.

Most Cisco books with real technical content are heavy enough to stun a moose with. This book is small enough to read in a couple of hours and light enough to carry around in your laptop bag.

You’ll learn how to upgrade your router, back up your router configuration, implement a private WAN, and more!

“This book isn’t a reference – it’s a survival guide, a ‘break glass in case of emergency’ safety harness… What I found remarkable was how it was obviously written for people like me – who have little interest in router management but whose jobs depend on the consistent, trusted functioning of such infrastructure.”
–ASP.NETPRO, on the 1st edition