Preface

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Preface

Why This Book Is Necessary

Content of This Book

Authors

Editors Acknowledgments

 

Internet Protocol (IP), the network protocol of the Internet, is seen as the protocol for the convergence of telephony and data. Addressing is an important part of network engineering, either in the telephony world or the Internet world. One of the richest parts of IP is its addressing. Addressing has been so well designed in IP that the Internet has grown from three computers to hundreds of millions of computers, used in day-to-day work and fun, while remaining efficient.

 

As you will see, this book discusses two versions of IP: IPv4 and IPv6. The current Internet is IPv4 (Internet Protocol version 4), and the new Internet beginning to be deployed is based on IPv6 (Internet Protocol version 6). This book describes addressing for both versions.

Why This Book Is Necessary

Although many books cover TCP/IP, no one book really goes into as much depth with all issues related to IP addressing as this one does. It is comprehensive. The intended audience of the book is someone with a technical or management background, who understands the basics of TCP/IP and wants a complete handbook related to addressing. This is an intermediate level book.

 

Addressing is so important in any networking world that a misunderstanding can have important consequences. For example, a poorly designed addressing architecture for a large network can cause the organization to renumber the whole network, which can involve a long down-time as well as instability during the renumbering phase. This can cost a lot of money. But, at the same time, a good addressing architecture cost no money, just good planning and a good understanding of the issues. This is one reason why this book exists.

 

Content of This Book

 

Chapter 1 discusses the IPv4 addressing architecture, which is the basis of this book. Classes and subnetting are key in the IPv4 design. Once you understand IP addresses, Chapter 2 tells you how to make an address plan for your network.

 

If your network is not connected to the Internet, or if you use any kind of network address translation (NAT) device, you are going to use the private addresses reserved for that purpose. Private addresses are detailed in Chapter 3. If you use NAT, or simply want to know about it, then you should read Chapter 4, which is a comprehensive chapter on this technology.

 

Although most networks can have a good address plan using standard subnetting techniques, some networks need variable length subnet masks (VLSM), mostly because they are not balanced in the ratio of number of networks to number of hosts . VLSM is covered in Chapter 5.

 

IP addressing is the basis of routing; Chapter 6 deals with all the details of routing as they relate to addressing.

 

IP requires more configuration in comparison with other LAN protocols. These issues have been resolved by BOOTP and DHCP, which are covered in Chapter 7.

Multicast provides a way to have one-to-many or many-to-many packets by giving the group of destination hosts a specific and special IP address in the class D range. This is a great and innovative way to use IP addressing, and it is covered in Chapter 8.

Since the growth rate of the Internet is phenomenal, engineers developed a new version of the IP protocol, called IPv6, which brings new schemes of addressing. With addressing, IPv6 enables autoconfiguration, renumbering, efficient routing on the backbone, etc. Chapters 9 and 10 9 discuss IPv6 and its header and addressing structure in depth.

 

 

 

The entire book covers the technology of IP addressing. In addition, you need to get a range of addresses for your network. The Annex discusses address assignments and registration.

 

This book demonstrates that IP addressing is a very important feature of IP, which has evolved over time as the Internet and other organizations needed change. The new version of IP, IPv6, continues to use addressing as an important tool for network engineering.

Authors

A different person has written each chapter of this book, in order to provide a variety of experiences in the same book. Although I tried to do my best in reviewing the technical content, the individual authors retain the complete responsibility for their writing.

Editors Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the Syngress staff (Eva Banaszek and Matt Pederson) for their support; my colleagues of Viagnie (Florent Parent, Rgis Desmeules, and Annie Morin) with whom I always have good discussions on technical issues that enrich my own experience; Hlne Richard, our technical writer who reviewed my own chapters, and finally my wife, for all her patience.

 

I hope you will enjoy this comprehensive book on IP addressing.

 

Marc Blanchet

Ste-Foy, Qubec, Canada