Using and Managing PPP: Help for Network Administrators

Point-to-Point Protocol (PPP) plays a big role in modern networks, from the Internet on down. It's the most popular way of sending and receiving datagrams across a serial connection--typically a telephone line. In Using and Managing PPP, Andrew Sun reveals the details of this widely used networking technology.

Sun starts with an overview of how PPP fits into the Open Systems Interconnect (OSI) networking model and then details the operation of RS-232 (Recommended Standard 232) connections and modems. He describes the anatomy of a PPP link, explaining how a connection gets established and how the protocol breaks data into frames for transport--with particular attention to how TCP/IP packets move across a PPP connection.

Using and Managing PPP also attacks PPP from a practical perspective, conveying information about how to set up and use the protocol on several popular platforms. It provides specific instructions for setting up PPP under Solaris, Linux, Windows 3.x, Windows 98, and both versions of Windows NT 4 for both dial-in and dial-out applications.

Even Sun acknowledges that those planning to implement PPP in software ought to consult the IEEE documents that define it, though this book lacks sufficient low-level detail for that kind of work. However, Using and Managing PPP serves the purposes of administrators and others interested in getting the most out of PPP from a network-management perspective. --David Wall