Great book on networking   October 9, 2006

A network troubleshooting book to add to your collection   September 18, 2003

On the down side, the book has a handful of typos, plus a major error in ch. 7 regarding active vs. passive FTP modes. Page 271 states "the PASV command allows you to use what is called a passive file transfer, whereby the client initiates the port 20 connection to the server... In Frame 23, you see the server responding with the port and IP address pair for the client to use in making its port 20 connection to the server." This is false; the traffic trace shows the passive data transfer comes from port 2392 TCP on the client to port 4293 on the server. This may not seem like a big deal, but this is a book explaining how protocols work!

Overall, I liked TAATT. I found the Shockwave videos and tracefiles posted to the publisher's web site to be good references, although not all traces discussed in the book are reproduced on the Web. Along with Haugdahl's "Network Analysis and Troubleshooting" and Bardwell/Oppenheimer's "Troubleshooting Campus Networks," you should get a good sense of how many popular protocols operate. Note all three books tend to sidestep the use of port 445 TCP to offer SMB directly over TCP, concentrating on SMB over NetBIOS over port 139 TCP. Everyone still talks about primary and backup domain controllers, although Windows 2000 uses Active Directory with all domain controllers being "primaries." Windows 2000 prefers port 445 TCP, but no one shows traces of its activities. (Only Haugdahl has an excuse -- Addison Wesley published his book in 2000.)