THE MAGAZINE OF USENIX & SAGE June 2002 volume 27 • number 3 inside: BOOK REVIEWS & The Advanced Computing Systems Association & The System Administrators Guild the bookworm by Peter H. Salus have to confess that I read and com- mented on an early manuscript and Peter H. Salus is a member of the ACM, wrote the Foreword to McCarthy’s book. BOOKS REVIEWED IN THIS COLUMN the Early English Text I have no financial interest in it.) Society, and the Trol- lope Society, and is a life member of the Cups of Java American Oriental J2ME is the Java 2 Micro-Edition: it is IP ROUTING Society. He is Chief Knowledge Officer at designed for resource-limited devices RAVI MALHOTRA Matrix.net. He owns Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly &Associates, 2002. neither a dog nor a like cell phones or pagers. It is really Pp. 219. ISBN 0-596-00275-0. cat. cleverly designed. Topley has done the [email protected] excellent job that I’ve come to expect THE PROCMAIL COMPANION from the Nutshell handbooks and refer- ARTIN C ARTHY I’ve got a heap of books I want to talk M M C ences. Edinburgh, Scotland: Addison-Wesley, 2002. about this month. And a poster, too, for Pp. 235. ISBN 0-201-73790-6. those of you with space on a wall J2EE is the Java 2 Enterprise Edition. J2ME IN A NUTSHELL between “User Friendly” and “Dilbert” This tutorial is full of real examples and KIM TOPLEY clippings. thoroughly useful pointers on just how Sebastopol, CA:O'Reilly & Associates, 2002. J2EE can be used in your enterprise. The Pp. 450. ISBN 0-596-00253-X. Getting Around CD contains three (!) J2EE tutorials, There are currently over 175 million J2SE and J2EE software development THE J2EE TUTORIAL host machines on the Internet (up from kits, a sample Java BluePrints, and the STEPHANIE BODOFF, ET AL. Boston, MA: Addison-Wesley, 2002. 213 in August 1981). Getting mail, VoIP, Forte for Java plug-in. Whew! streaming video, http[s] packets, ftp and Pp. 491 + CD-ROM. ISBN 0-201-79168-4. For over five years, Flanagan has occu- scp packets, AUDIO, and other stuff pied a prominent place on my bookcase. JAVA IN A NUTSHELL, 4TH ED. from box to box is not trivial. I have AVID LANAGAN The 4th edition of his “Desktop Quick D F relied on folks like Huitema and Perl- Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly & Associates, 2002. Reference” has gained a lot of weight: man to elucidate the complexities of Pp. 969. ISBN 0-596-00283-1. just over doubling the 438 pages of the routing in the past. Malhotra’s small 1996 version. Hardly any flab, though. EMBEDDED LINUX (barely 200 pages) book will now live CRAIG HOLLABAUGH next to my desk. Though ostensibly A Pair of Penguins Boston, MA: Addison-Wesley, 2002. Pp. 419. about Cisco routing, Malhotra’s exposi- ISBN 0-672-32226-9. It’s no secret that I’m a Linux user and a tions of RIP, IGRP, EIGRP, RIP-2, OSPF, Linux enthusiast. Over the past two LINUX ADMINISTRATION HANDBOOK and BGP-4 are good enough for those years or so, more developers have turned EVI NEMETH, ET AL. working with Juniper, Nortel, etc., hard- to Linux to provide solutions for Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2002. ware. Definitely a must have! Pp. 889. ISBN 0-13-008466-2. embedded systems. Hollabaugh’s pres- Incidentally, if you’re interested at all entation is more than merely adequate, VMWARE in Internet history, Peacock (www. but I have to admit that I still prefer BRIAN WARD peacockmaps.com) has a really fine “First John Lombardo’s presentation (pub- San Francisco, CA: No Starch Press, 2002. Pp. 249. ISBN 1-886411-72-7. Maps of the Internet” poster for $29.95. lished by New Riders last year). Just right for covering the hole in the And here’s the book for every penguin- INTRODUCTION TO PROGRAMMING plaster you tossed that CPU through . IN EMACS LISP, 2ND ED user! Nemeth’s UNIX handbook has ROBERT J. CHASSELL /dev/null spun through several editions since Boston, MA: FSF, 2001. Pp. 292. 1989. Each one more impressive than I get a lot of email. Much of it offers me ISBN 1882114-43-4 the previous. Now here’s the Linux ver- $$$ or XXX or and opportunity to buy sion, written by Nemeth and her col- Viagra or enlarge my breast size. For sev- leagues, Garth Snyder and Trent Hein. It eral years, procmail has been my friend: covers Red Hat, SuSE and Debian. It is I’m now down to about 100 messages a well-written. If you use Linux or if day; some of them actually meaningful. someone on your site uses Linux, this Marty McCarthy has written a fine book book is indispensible. Thanks, Evi. on setting up and using procmail. (I Thanks, Garth. Thanks, Trent. 56 Vol. 27, No. 3 ;login: book reviews Virtual Machines Channel, SCSI, and TCP/IP. The level of the things that need to happen for IP coverage is introductory, and the knowl- SANs to succeed. A virtual machine enables the operator EVIEWS edgeable reader can skim through these R to pretend to use one OS while running No book is perfect. In the explanation of on top of another. VMWare does this for chapters. But network experts learning OOK RAID (Figure 3-1 in the book), a “0 + 1” B a variety of Windows platforms, Linux about storage or storage gurus who need RAID is shown as a mirror of two to learn about networking will find one and FreeBSD. Ward’s presentation is striped arrays (RAID 0, then 1). Almost or more of these chapters worth careful good, though I have a minor problem: no one implements it this way; instead, reading. my notion of how to “get the most out they stripe together a set of mirrored of Windows” is to just run something Chapter 8 is the heart of the book, where drives (RAID 1, then 0). On page 174 the else. iSCSI (Internet SCSI), iFCP (Internet lower drawing should read “Tunnel Fibre Channel Protocol), and FCIP Mode Security Association” as opposed Lisping (Fibre Channel over Internet Protocol) to “Transport Mode.”To spend more It has been over a decade between edi- are discussed and contrasted. Clark’s than a couple of sentences on the book’s tions of Bob Chassell’s Emacs Lisp book. extensive Fibre Channel background flaws would be an injustice to the The new edition contains a really fine really shines here as he is able to exam- tremendous collection of knowledge tutorial as well as the new features ine how these new protocols interact contained within. This book is destined included in GNU Emacs v21. It’s defi- with existing Fibre Channel systems. You to stand for many years as the reference nitely worthwhile. Bob, another fine can spend weeks combing the standards on IP SANs. piece of work. (I’ve done it!) trying to learn what Clark clearly explains in a few simple pages. SOFTWARE FOR YOUR HEAD: CORE IP SANS: A GUIDE TO ISCSI, IFCP, PROTOCOLS FOR CREATING AND AND FCIP PROTOCOLS FOR STOR- It turns out that these protocols do not really stand on their own, and the next MAINTAINING SHARED VISION AGE AREA NETWORKS three chapters are devoted to iSNS JIM AND MICHELE MCCARTHY TOM CLARK (Internet Storage Name Server), secu- Boston: Addison-Wesley, 2001. Pp. 464. Boston: Addison-Wesley, 2002 ISBN: 0-201-60456-6 ISBN: 0-201-75277-8 rity, and QoS (Quality of Service). The Reviewed by Steve Johnson Reviewed by Steve Reames iSNS protocol provides naming and dis- [email protected] [email protected] covery services that are inherent to Fibre This is one of the more unusual books Storage Area Networks (SANs), and Channel, but require an additional on software engineering available today. storage networking in general, are server for IP-based storage protocols. Some of the ideas it proposes are bril- becoming increasingly important com- The chapter on security discusses the liant, some are weird, and some are ponents in corporate data centers. Tradi- issue from two perspectives. First, secu- both. tionally dominated by Fibre Channel, a rity in Fibre Channel SANs is discussed. recent plethora of IP-based standards This gives the reader the needed per- In an earlier book (Dynamics of Software are competing to either augment or spective for the second section, which Development), Jim McCarthy states that replace the entrenched standard. Clark covers the same issues for IP-based “Software is the process of turning ideas has done an excellent job of putting SANs. into bits.”He goes on to make a convinc- together the important aspects of these A short chapter on Infiniband gives ing case that the big problem in software new protocols, and comparing and con- some insights about how this interface engineering is not the individual pro- trasting them in a fair and even-handed may or may not become part of SANs in grammers’ abilities to turn their individ- way. If you have anything to do with the future. The chapter on SAN applica- ual ideas into bits but, rather, “aligning storage networks, you need to read this tions is thorough and detailed, and all the ideas in the various programmers’ book. probably provides the most extensive heads.”If the ideas are aligned, any problems one person may have realizing IP SANs is just over 280 pages long and collection of real-world scenarios yet these ideas are quickly caught and reme- packed with illustrations.