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

Chapter 3: Using Linux and Linux Tools for Network Diagnostics

In this chapter, we'll cover some "how it works" networking basics, as well as how to use our Linux workstation in network troubleshooting. When you're done with this chapter, you should have tools to troubleshoot local and remote network services, as well as to "inventory" your network and its services.

In particular, we'll cover the following topics:

  • Networking basics – the OSI model.
  • Layer 2 – relating IP and MAC addresses using ARP, with some more detail on MAC addresses.
  • Layer 4 – how TCP and UDP ports work, including the TCP "three-way handshake" and how this appears in Linux commands.
  • Local TCP and UDP port enumeration, and how these relate to running services.
  • Remote port enumeration using both native tools.
  • Remote port enumeration using installed scanners (netcat and nmap in particular).
  • Finally, we'll cover...