Organization

Conceptually, this book is divided into three parts: fundamental concepts, tutorial, and reference. The first three chapters are a basic discussion of the TCP/IP protocols and services. This discussion provides the fundamental concepts necessary to understand the rest of the book. The remaining chapters provide a "how-to" tutorial. Chapters 4-7 discuss how to plan a network installation and configure the basic software necessary to get a network running. Chapters 8-10 discuss how to set up various important network services. The final chapters, 11-13, cover how to perform the ongoing tasks that are essential for a reliable network: troubleshooting, security, and keeping up with changing network information. The book concludes with a series of appendices that are technical references for important commands and programs.

This book contains the following chapters:

Chapter 1, Overview of TCP/IP, gives the history of TCP/IP, a description of the structure of the protocol architecture, and a basic explanation of how the protocols function.

Chapter 2, Delivering the Data, describes addressing and how data passes through a network to reach the proper destination.

Chapter 3, Network Services, discusses the relationship between clients and server systems, and the various services that are central to the function of a modern internet.

Chapter 4, Getting Started , begins the discussion of network setup and configuration. This chapter discusses the preliminary configuration planning needed before you configure the systems on your network.

Chapter 5, Basic Configuration , describes how to configure TCP/IP in the UNIX kernel, and how to configure the Internet daemon that starts most of the network services.

Chapter 6, Configuring the Interface , tells you how to identify a network interface to the network software. This chapter provides examples of Ethernet, SLIP, and PPP interface configurations.

Chapter 7, Configuring Routing , describes how to set up routing so that systems on your network can communicate properly with other networks. It covers the static routing table, commonly used routing protocols, and gated, a package that provides the latest implementations of several routing protocols.

Chapter 8, Configuring DNS Name Service , describes how to administer the name server program that converts system names to Internet addresses.

Chapter 9, Configuring Network Servers , describes how to configure the most common network servers. The chapter discusses the BOOTP and DHCP configuration servers, the LPD print server, the POP and IMAP mail servers, the Network Filesystem (NFS), and the Network Information System (NIS).

Chapter 10, sendmail , discusses how to configure sendmail, which is the daemon responsible for delivering electronic mail.

Chapter 11, Troubleshooting TCP/IP , tells you what to do when something goes wrong. It describes the techniques and tools used to troubleshoot TCP/IP problems, and gives examples of actual problems and their solutions.

Chapter 12, Network Security , discusses how to live on the Internet without excessive risk. This chapter covers the security threats brought by the network, and the plans and preparations you can make to meet those threats.

Chapter 13, Internet Information Resources , describes the information resources available on the Internet and how you can make use of them. It also describes how to set up an information server of your own.

Appendix A, PPP Tools, is a reference guide to the various programs used to configure a serial port for TCP/IP. The reference covers dip, pppd, and chat.

Appendix B, A gated Reference, is a complete reference guide to the configuration language of the gated routing package.

Appendix C, A named Reference, is a reference guide to the Berkeley Internet Name Domain (BIND) name server software.

Appendix D, A dhcpd Reference, is a reference guide to the Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol Daemon (dhcpd).

Appendix E, A sendmail Reference, is a detailed reference to sendmail syntax, options and flags. It also contains sections of the sendmail.cf configuration file developed in the step-by-step examples in Chapter 10.

Appendix F, Selected TCP/IP Headers, contains detailed protocol references, taken directly from the RFCs, that support the protocol troubleshooting examples in Chapter 11.