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

Capturing tools

Many different tools can be used to capture packets off the network and either analyze the packet data directly or store them in pcap files. There are even more tools that will take those pcap files and allow you to do further offline analysis on them.

tcpdump

We've referenced tcpdump several times. This is a command-line packet capture tool, which means that it can be used on systems that don't have a GUI or if you are using a non-GUI interface such as SSH. Because it's not dealing with any graphics and isn't preprocessing packets for you to look at (to tell you any of the protocol specifics for instance), it's one of the higher-performance, lowest-impact tools you'll find for packet capture.

tcpdump uses the Berkely Packet Filter (BPF) syntax to decide which packets to capture. This can be used to filter by IP address, MAC address, protocol, or even specific flags in a TCP packet.

Wireshark

Wireshark is one of the more...