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 8 – Certificate Services on Linux

  1. The first function is the most important and is most often overlooked. A certificate provides trust and authentication. The fact that the hostname matches either the CN or SAN fields in the certificate provides the authentication needed to start the session. The fact that the certificate is signed by a trusted CA means that the authentication can be trusted by the client. This will be revisited again in the next chapter of this book, Chapter 9, RADIUS Services for Linux.

    The second function is that the certificate material is used to provide some of the material for the secret key that is used in the symmetrical encryption of the subsequent session. Note, though, that as we progress to other use cases, many situations that make use of certificates do not do session encryption at all—the certificates are there purely for authentication.

  2. The PKCS#12 format, often seen with a suffix of .pfx or sometimes .p12, combines the...