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

Classic/network-based IPS solutions – Snort and Suricata

As we discussed previously, the traditional IPS story started in the 1990s when Martin Roesch wrote Snort. Snort turned into a commercial offering when Sourcefire was created, but even today, after Cisco acquired Sourcefire, Snort still has an open source version that can be installed on any Linux platform.

Because Snort was so prevalent, it was widely used both directly, within Sourcefire products, as well as being licensed in many (many) next-generation firewall (NGFW) products. This last situation changed after the Cisco acquisition; no commercial firewall wanted to have an IPS from a competing company on their platform.

Marketing aside, the "traditional" version of Snort (2.x) had several shortfalls:

  • It was completely text-based, there was no GUI. However, there are several web frontend projects available for Snort.
  • The messages were often cryptic – often, you'd need to be a...