The Old Joel on Software Forum: Part 4 (of 5) - Network - Switches, Gateways, TCP/IP

Network - Switches, Gateways, TCP/IP - Mysterious

I am a developer that has had a sheltered work life-style - almost all my development work has been on the business layer tier.

For issues with relation to the hardware piping - our group have handed this off to a different team. Maybe naively I have always assumed that the network runs well and, as a developer, I viewed it as a black-box.

Times are changing - with big cut-backs our networking group is no loger the force it used to be. When we recently deployed a new application, that ran well in test scenarios, it was very sluggish at times. This was due to issues with network failure - the database back-up servers were running on the same sub-net and were flooding the network.

I was wondering if posters know of a good place to start learning about network issues - and what would be the pertinent info to pick up as a developer.

Ram Dass
Monday, March 29, 2004

Sounds like your test scenarios would have been helped by dummynet.

http://info.iet.unipi.it/~luigi/ip_dummynet/

I learned everything I ever needed to know about networking from TCP/IP Illustrated and UNIX Network Programming. YMMV however.

SG
Monday, March 29, 2004

Stevens, TCP/IP illustrated (vol 1). Yup.

hoser
Monday, March 29, 2004

You could also look at "TCP/IP Network Administration", a classic from O'Reilly.

Fred
Monday, March 29, 2004