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VPNs Illustrated: Tunnels, VPNs, and IPsec Review by Stephen Northcutt
Advanced, takes networking books to the next level
NOTE: This book is not for everyone, if you have not invested at least 40 hours looking at network traffic, I would recommend you pass.
This book is zero fluff, it makes you want to spin up your scratch boxes and follow along. In fact I did just that, I have to switch to a new ISP that requires PPoE and I was always curious how that worked, the book gave me just enough of a clue to interpret what was passing in and out of my house.
The world has a new grandmaster of tcpdump and I have seem some pretty good ones over the years. Once I designed a T-shirt for a SANS conference with the hexadecimal output from a tcpdump; only we flipped it so it was running down the shirt and rendered in green, to resemble the matrix.
The packet was a DNS reply. In the additional records we said good things about SANS; after all, gotta market to eat. There was an error intentionally placed into the shirt and we designated a prize for the first attendee to find the error. A student walked by wearing the shirt and the "4500" in the hex field caught one of the instructor's eye. She followed him around murmuring, it is sideways, UDP, DNS, a reply, there are additional records, wait a minute that pointer entry is wrong. We watched in amazement, when she was done and looked up, the entire SANS faculty bowed to her. Because a mal-formatted packet can kill a packet analyzer the world needs people like Judy and Jon.
This is not a beginner book and Jon expects you to catch the 4500 stuff pretty fast. However, if you have followed the discipline of tcpdump instead of some packet analysis tool that spells out everything this book can take you to the next level.
VPNs Illustrated is rich in diagrams, including packet headers and state diagrams, examples of network traffic, and cartoons that explain the architecture of the system, or network. It is amazingly well edited, my only nit is on page 93, line 1 spacing off by one character.
The book has a strong linux bias, if you are a Windows person, you will be able to follow along for about 60% of the book using Windump, but you will not be able to use the tools or source.
This is the perfect reference for the person that knows networking and wants to really invest in taking it to the next level.
Finally, the dedication to Rich Stevens was over the top and heartfelt appreciated. I will never forget the man who taught me how to read a packet.