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

Why do I need to secure my Linux hosts?

Like almost every other operating system, the Linux install is streamlined to make the installation easy, with as few hiccups during and after the installation as possible. As we saw in earlier chapters, this often means an installation with no firewall enabled. In addition, the operating system version and package version will of course match the install media, rather than the latest version of each. In this chapter, we'll discuss how default settings in Linux are often not set to what most would consider secure, and how as an industry, we remedy this with legislation, regulations, and recommendations.

As for the initial installation being out of date, luckily, most Linux distributions have an auto-update process enabled. This is governed by two lines in the /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/20auto-upgrades file:

APT::Periodic::Update-Package-Lists "1";
APT::Periodic::Unattended-Upgrade "1";

Both settings are set to 1 (enabled...