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

Remote port and service enumeration – nmap

The tool that is most widely used to scan network resources is NMAP (short for Network Mapper). NMAP started as a simple port scanner tool, but is well past that set of simple functions now, with a long list of functions.

First of all, nmap is not installed by default on a basic Ubuntu workstation (though it is included by default in many other distros). To install it, run sudo apt-get install nmap.

As we go forward working with nmap, please try the various commands we're using in our examples. You'll likely see similar results, and will learn about this valuable tool along the way. You may learn lots about your network along the way too!

Important note

One very important caveat on the advice of "try this out yourself." NMAP is a pretty innocuous tool, it almost never causes network problems. However, if you are running this against a production network, you will want to get a feel for that network first...