Book Image

Linux for Networking Professionals

By : Rob VandenBrink
1 (1)
Book Image

Linux for Networking Professionals

1 (1)
By: Rob VandenBrink

Overview of this book

As Linux continues to gain prominence, there has been a rise in network services being deployed on Linux for cost and flexibility reasons. If you are a networking professional or an infrastructure engineer involved with networks, extensive knowledge of Linux networking is a must. This book will guide you in building a strong foundation of Linux networking concepts. The book begins by covering various major distributions, how to pick the right distro, and basic Linux network configurations. You'll then move on to Linux network diagnostics, setting up a Linux firewall, and using Linux as a host for network services. You'll discover a wide range of network services, why they're important, and how to configure them in an enterprise environment. Finally, as you work with the example builds in this Linux book, you'll learn to configure various services to defend against common attacks. As you advance to the final chapters, you’ll be well on your way towards building the underpinnings for an all-Linux datacenter. By the end of this book, you'll be able to not only configure common Linux network services confidently, but also use tried-and-tested methodologies for future Linux installations.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
1
Section 1: Linux Basics
4
Section 2: Linux as a Network Node and Troubleshooting Platform
8
Section 3: Linux Network Services

Building a private Certificate Authority

Building a private CA starts with the same decision we've faced with each of our infrastructure packages: Which CA package should we use? As with so many server solutions, there are several to pick from. A few options are outlined here:

  • OpenSSL technically gives us all the tools we need to write our own scripts and maintain our own directory structure of public key infrastructure (PKI) bits and pieces. You can create root and subordinate CAs, make a CSR, and then sign those certificates to make real certificates. In practice, while this approach is universally supported, it ends up being a bit too far on the manual side of the spectrum for most people.
  • Certificate Manager is a CA bundled with Red Hat Linux and related distributions.
  • openSUSE and related distributions can use the native Yet another Setup Tool (YaST) configuration and management tool as a CA.
  • Easy-RSA is a set of scripts that are essentially a wrapper...