Roaming the Internet, Part 3

Up until a year ago, I was only vaguely aware of the Internet's existence. In fact, my only exposure to the Internet was those funny electronic-mail addresses on some peoples' business cards: mickey@disney.com and so on. Then by a strange quirk of fate, I became involved in a project with some genetics researchers at my hospital, and found that nearly all of the databases they needed access to were available only via the Internet. For better or worse, at just about the same time, the trade-book publishers were also discovering the Internet as a new market niche, so I had no dearth of reading material. And fortunately for me, some of the books actually turned out to be helpful!

Becoming acquainted with the Internet is like falling through a manhole and discovering a city of aliens with their own markets, libraries, and culture, living out an unsuspected parallel existence only a few feet away. This new world has its own code of conduct, its own heroes and villains, its own pantheon of gods and sacred cows, and its own collection of legends and myths. The players, the playing field, and for that matter the rules of the game are totally unfamiliar, even allowing for some previous experience with stand-alone UNIX systems or commercial online services such as CompuServe. To me, after having floundered my way up the learning curve over the last year, there are three particularly amazing aspects of the Internet: The TCP/IP, e-mail, and other fundamental Internet protocols, although adopted in a fairly ad hoc manner a decade ago, continue to work well, even though the number of hosts on the net has been scaled up by at least three orders of magnitude. The government and the primary network users pour money into the network backbone and increase its capacity year after year, but no attempt is made to make individual hosts liable for the traffic generated by their users. (For that matter, no one is exactly sure how many hosts are on the net, let alone how many users.) Many Internet users are totally oblivious to the incredible technology and infrastructure they are exploiting, and squander network bandwidth with pointless flame wars, trivial appeals for help, thinly disguised attempts to cheat on take-home exams, and downloading of semi-useless shareware utilities from archive servers all over the globe.

Those of you who don't work in a large corporation or educational institution will probably have your first encounters with the Internet via dial-up to a so-called "public provider." This gives you access to world-wide electronic mail and USENET news, but the low bandwidths of a modem connection essentially make you a second-class citizen on the net. To reap the full benefits of the archive sites and tools such as gopher and WAIS, you really need to be hardwired to the network. Making this happen is no trivial chore, and a job I recommend you leave to the experts. Nevertheless, I wanted to wind up this series of book reviews about the Internet (see also the December 1992 and February 1993 issues of DDJ) by mentioning a few books that will help you decipher the many layers of network arcana and (eventually) become somewhat self-sufficient. In addition, I've included a list of other Internet-related books, some previously reviewed.

DNS and Bind, by Paul Albitz and Cricket Liu, and TCP/IP Network Administration, by Craig Hunt, are members of the "Nutshell Handbook" series from O'Reilly and Associates. Although there is some degree of overlap between the two books, I strongly recommend that you get both; the differing perspectives and emphasis of the authors can be quite helpful when trying to debug TCP/IP or mail problems. TCP/IP Network Administration starts with basic TCP/IP protocol concepts, moves on to routing, domain name services, and sendmail configuration, and finishes up with chapters on troubleshooting and security. DNS and Bind, as you would expect from the title, focuses much more intensely on setting up and maintaining domain name servers and resolvers. Both books, like all the other O'Reilly books I've been exposed to, demonstrate careful writing, tasteful editing, and painstaking production. They're a pleasure to own and use.

The Internet Message, by Marshall T. Rose, is billed as "The Exciting Fourth Book in MTR's Networking Trilogy." Rose is well known for his work on the Internet mail system and OSI directory services over the last decade, and more recently has been influential in the development of multimedia-mail protocols. The Internet Message is basically an explanation of how the Internet name services, mail protocols, mail-transport agents, and mail-user agents work and interact, with a great deal of Rose's personal humor, philosophy, and editorialization thrown in at no extra charge. For example: There are still people in the world who think OSI is going to happen. I suppose there are also people in the world who think that the moon is made of cheese. However, I wouldn't necessarily trust the judgement of either kind of optimist.

Although Rose has little patience with the ponderous, poorly thought-out OSI standards and implementations, he's also ecumenical. The notorious weak points of the UNIX-based Internet tools come in for their share of criticism:

Perhaps the most commonly used implementation of a mail transfer agent in the Internet is sendmail. It is a tribute to the Internet mail system that it works so well given that sendmail behaves so poorly... Clearly, sendmail is an excellent example of how to do a lot of things wrong. But, since sendmail is shipped with Berkeley UNIX, most sites just put up with it... People just stumble along with a canned sendmail configuration, poking at it from time to time if problems arise.

End-User Books

Network Administration

Networking Technology