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

What are certificates?

Certificates are essentially attestations of truth—in other words, a certificate is a document that says, trust me, this is true. This sounds simple, and in some ways it is. But in other ways, the various uses of certificates and deploying a CA infrastructure securely is a significant challenge—for instance, we've seen some spectacular failings in public CAs in recent years: companies whose only business was securing the certificate process couldn't get it right when under scrutiny. We cover the challenges and solutions in securing CAs in more detail later in this chapter, in the Securing your CA infrastructure and CT sections.

At the root of things, workstations and servers have a list of CAs that they trust. This trust is delivered using cryptographically signed documents that are the public certificates of each of those CAs, which are stored in a specific place on a Linux or Windows host.

When you browse to a web server, for instance...