The introduction states that this book is aimed at systems administrators who are not security experts, but have some responsibility for ensuring the integrity of their systems. That would seem to cover most sysadmins.
Vitals:
| Title | Mastering Network Security, Second Edition |
| Author | Chris Brenton/Cameron Hunt |
| Pages | 490 |
| ISBN | 0-7821-4142-0 |
| Publisher | Sybex Computer Books |
| Purchase | Amazon |
Summary and Opinions:
However, whether the material in
this work is at a suitable level for most sysadmins is open to
question. Now, to be fair to the authors, it seems that this second
edition is a reissue, only marginally revised, of a book that was
originally published seven years ago. (Under most standard contracts,
publishers have the right to do this, and authors can't do much about
it.) At that point, the material might have been pretty reasonable.
Currently, it isn't.
Chapter one discusses systems theory. While the application of the
text to network and security management is reasonably obvious in
hypothetical terms, it is not at all clear in regard to direct
operation in the real world. (This is particularly true for those who
are not security professionals.) The systems development life cycle
(SDLC) is covered in chapter two and, again, while it is an important
topic, the relation to security is not made manifest. The
introduction to networking itself covers the OSI (Open Systems
Interconnection) model, routing, and bits of TCP/IP, in chapter three.
One would have thought that this would have been old news to
sysadmins. The same is true of the material on transmission and
network topology, in chapter four. There is some mention of security
issues, but the discussion is minimal.
Chapter five has a reasonable overview of firewalls, although the
terminology is not always standard. Chapter six is documentation for
the Cisco PIX firewall. The information about intrusion detection
systems, in chapter seven, provides good material on points often
neglected by other works, and adds a guide to Snort. The coverage of
cryptography, in chapter eight, has a confusing structure. Most of
the material on virtual private networks consists of screen shots of
Microsoft's RRAS (Routing and Remote Access Server), in chapter nine.
Chapter ten relies on old concepts and technologies to discuss viruses
and other malware. Disaster prevention and recovery, in chapter
eleven, concentrates on building redundancy and the VERITAS server
based backup system. A good deal of information about Windows, most
of which may have some relevance to security, is in chapter twelve.
Some introductory, and some network, data about UNIX is available in
chapter thirteen. Chapter fourteen describes how information can be
obtained about your system in order to mount an intrusion attack.
Some resources for security are mentioned in chapter fifteen.
Overall, the book does provide a fair amount of information that would
likely be of help to most network administrators in securing their
systems and networks. However, there is also a lot of detail that is
not directly relevant to the task, some erroneous content, and not a
few gaps. While the original authors may have mastered their topic,
the volume currently on offer does not reflect that.
Rob Slade is a data communications and security specialist from North Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. His first love is teaching, and he got into computers because of an interest in what they could do in improving the education process in the public school system. He still has links with the education system in BC with both grade school and the college system, and writes and speaks for the computer educators in the province. He has a B.Sc. from the University of BC, an M.S. (in Computer and Information Science Education, which no one can ever remember) from the University of Oregon, and a Diploma of Christian Studies from Regent College. He is the founder of the DECUS Canada Education and Training SIG.
To find out more information about Rob, you can go to his website here. You can also read more reviews from Rob here.
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