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

Configuring nftables

As we discussed at the beginning of this chapter, iptables is being deprecated and eventually retired in Linux, in favor of nftables. With that in mind, what advantages does using nftables bring?

Deploying nftables rules is much quicker than in iptables – under the hood, iptables modifies the kernel as each rule is added. This doesn't happen in nftables. Related to that, nftables also has an API. This makes it much easier to configure using orchestration or "network as code" tools. These tools include apps such as Terraform, Ansible, Puppet, Chef, and Salt. What this allows system administrators to do is more easily automate the deployment of hosts, so that a new virtual machine can be deployed into a private or public cloud in minutes, rather than in hours. More importantly, applications that might involve several hosts can be deployed in parallel.

nftables also operates much more efficiently in the Linux kernel, so for any given ruleset...