IPv6 Essentials [Kindle Edition]

If your day to day involvement with IP consists only of managing WINS, DNS, DHCP and subnet configurations, then this book is not for you. Don't get me wrong, there are many interesting sections worth reading that go far in introducing administrative aspects of IPv6, and no time is wasted reading them. This title, however, is for those of you who daily get really dirty with IP and want to know everything there is to know about the new version, the differences between the versions, the features and behaviors of IPv6, and the new tools for configuration, management and tracking.

The book starts of with a very brief and concise history of IPv6, and then jumps right into well explained sections on packet structure, addressing, and ICMP. Each of those sections are written clearly and interestingly, make good use of figures to visually illustrate the information being discussed. Once the structure and hardware-related management points have been driven home, the author provides many chapters that serve as an excellent reference guide and will prove useful well after your initial read. Chapters on IPv6 security, QoS, Upper-layer and routing protocols proceed extended reviews and demonstrations of real-life networking design aspects, protocol version interoperability, co-existence configurations, and toped off with platform specific utility demonstrations.

If you are planning on moving your environment to IPv6, increasing your understanding of the technology for more informed decisions, or looking for a reference guide to assist in your current administration of an IPv6 environment, this is the title for you.

i recently wrote a review of this book on openbsd journal at [web page] overall, this is the best ipv6 book i have read so far. hagen covers the standards with clarity and skill, and presents the information well. the illustrations are pretty good at showing the structure of the packets and the formats.

ipv6 essentials does well with explaining the internals of ipv6. routing, control messages, structures, advantages. this is fantastic, and if you're looking to learn ipv6 internals or thinking about migrating a network to support ipv6, this is a great book.

however, this book isn't for a typical user of a network. if you're at home and want to start on ipv6 (ie by tunneling to the 6bone), you're going to be at a loss. this book is slim on how t get up and running on ipv6 on windows, linux, bsd, etc ... this is its biggest weakness. other weaknesses include a lack of solid material for configuring routers for ipv6 (ie QoS, the intricacies of the routing protocols and integration), migrating applications (ie DNS zones), and security (it focuses only on IPsec).

as such, i give this book a "fair" review. it's good at what it does, but it really left me wanting a lot more useful information. not a typical oreilly book (which usually focuses on actually using stuff). 3.5 stars or so ...

having spoken to the author, recently, it turns out that a detailed protocol level discussion, as opposed to implementation, was her goal. and it was well met, so i'm bumping this to 4 stars.

I read and reviewed "IPv6 Network Administration" (INA) in August 2005 and "Running IPv6" (RI) in January 2006. I gave those books 5 stars, so I had high expectations for "IPv6 Essentials, 2nd Ed" (IE2E). INA and RI are very hands-on, implementation-specific books. IE2E is more concerned with explaining protocols and IPv6 features. In this respect, IE2E is the perfect complement to INA and RI.

Silvia Hagen is clearly an IPv6 fan. I was initially skeptical about IPv6 adoption after reading comments by Daniel J. Bernstein and Renesys' Todd Underwood. I still have concerns, but reading case studies in Ch 10 of actual IPv6 deployments helped me understand the author's enthusiasm. Sylvia is less critical of IPv6 than INA and RI, which share recommendations for real-world usage. I still have serious concerns with security vulnerabilities in autoconfiguration (one of the major "cost savers" of IPv6) and IPSec key management (the other major "improvement" in IPv6, basically requiring PKI). I also believe the emphasis on "end-node protection" (security models, pp 122-3) at the expense of network-level protection is insufficient. Transitioning to IPv6 is also not as easy as IE2E implies, especially for multihomed sites with provider independent address space. (SHIM6 might not be sufficient or workable, and IPv6 doesn't have PIAS.)

The strongest aspect of IE2E is the thorough coverage of IPv6 protocols. Plenty of people like to point to very old TCP/IP books as "the Bibles" of networking, but the world has changed during the last decade. IE2E offers a very strong chapter on Mobile IPv6 and explains how that version is superior to IPv4 (mainly due to Route Optimization). Sylvia's SSH port forwarding trick (p 277) was obvious but something I hadn't considered previously -- very cool. IE2E manages to keep a readable size of around 400 pages by citing plenty of RFCs and drafts, which is smart given the state of the protocols. The book is also very up-to-date and technically accurate, as far as I could tell. I had a minor problem with the author's perceptions of threats and vulnerabilities at the start of the security chapter. She uses the former term but means the latter term.

If you want implementation details, such as commands to run and techniques to try, I recommend INA or RI. If you want to really understand IPv6, I recommend IE2E. Since you should ideally want both sets of skills, you should have at least two IPv6 books on your desk.

Postscript: I suggest the third edition offer the set of network traces featured in IE2E for download, so readers can look at them individually.