Transnational Studies

Open source is the wave of the future, and James Kretchmar’s “Open Source Network Administration” (OSNA) catches that wave in fine form. Although the book is only 238 pages, it contains several gems. I read the book specifically for its coverage of the Multi Router Traffic Grapher (MRTG), OSU’s Flow Tools, and Sysmon. By following Kretchmar’s instructions, I easily installed these three applications.

I was able to accomplish these tasks because OSNA is a “cross platform” book. The author doesn’t limit himself to discussing how to run the tool. He gives guidance on how to configure Cisco routers to export NetFlow records or enable SNMP reporting. Sometimes these simple steps are buried in Cisco’s Web site, so I appreciated getting straight to business. I literally had these tools running in a matter of minutes thanks to Kretchmar’s instructions and the FreeBSD package system (e.g. “pkg_add -r “).

On the down side I thought coverage of old stand-bys like tcpdump, traceroute, and netstat was unnecessary. I would have liked reading about more “niche” tools like MTR. If you like this book, keep an eye out for my “Tao of Network Security Monitoring” in the summer. I’ll take a similar approach in several chapters by discussing security-related network monitoring tools.
Open Source Network Administration

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