Network administration is one of the main tasks of Linux system administration. By knowing how to configure system network interfaces in a reliable and optimal manner, Linux administrators can deploy and configure several network services including file, web, mail, and servers while working in large enterprise environments.
Chapter 1, Configuring a Router, starts by getting you to manually configure the IP address information on your system and then properly configure the system to bring up its interfaces automatically. From there, we'll move on to extending our system to act as a router for your own network, including DHCP for dynamically configuring client systems.
Chapter 2, Configuring DNS, will cover setting up your internal DNS server for both resolving external hostnames for you, as well as hosting DNS records for your own domain.
Chapter 3, Configuring IPv6, will provide a brief introduction of IPv6. We'll configure a tunnel to provide IPv6 connectivity, implement firewalling using iptables6, and provide IPv6 addresses to the rest of your network.
Chapter 4, Remote Access, will look at methods for remotely interacting with your new network using OpenSSH and OpenVPN.
Chapter 5, Web Servers, will set up web servers hosting PHP code, using both the Apache HTTPD server and NGINX.
Chapter 6, Directory Services, will tell us how to use Samba 4 to create an Active Directory-compatible directory service for your network.
Chapter 7, Setting up File Storage, will give us several options to explore for hosting your own file storage, including Samba, NFS, and WebDAV.
Chapter 8, Setting up E-mail, will tell us how to set up an e-mail server. We'll talk about how e-mail works as a service, set SMTP and IMAP mail services, and enable some spam filtering.
Chapter 9, Configuring XMPP, will tell us how to configure our own XMPP based IM service, configure it to communicate with other XMPP services, and configure Pidgin as a client to utilize the service.
Chapter 10 , Monitoring Your Network, will tell us how to start monitoring services on our network using Nagios.
Chapter 11, Mapping Your Network, will cover mapping out the network in order to discover what is actually there.
Chapter 12, Watching Your Network, will cover watching over our network through centralized logging and managing an intrusion detection system using Snort.
For this book you'll need a copy of Linux, preferably Ubuntu 14.04.
You'll also want access to three computers to install Linux on. One of the servers will need to have three network cards built into it.
For this purpose, I would strongly recommend using Virtual machines (VMs). Virtual Box will allow you to do this for free and is available on Windows, Linux, or OS X. You may find that the commercial offerings from VMWare, Parallels, or Microsoft may provide better performance, however.
This book is targeted at Linux system administrators who have a good basic understanding and some prior experience of how a Linux machine operates, but want to better understand how various network services function, how to set them up, and how to secure them. You should be familiar with how to set up a Linux server and how to install additional software on them.
In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "Modify /etc/default/isc-dhcp-server to add the interface which you should serve requests on."
A block of code is set as follows:
auto eth0
iface eth0 inet static
address 10.0.0.1
netmask 255.255.255.0Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
# ip link set dev eth0 up # ip link show eth0
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: "Under User Functions, click Create Regular Tunnel. You may create up to 5 tunnels."
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