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 is DNS?

DNS is essentially a translator between what people want and what a network needs to make that happen. People, for the most part, understand text names of hosts and services—for instance, google.com or paypal.com. However, these names don't mean anything to the underlying network. What DNS does is take those "fully qualified hostnames" that someone might type into an application, such as their browser at Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) Layer 7 (remember the OSI layers in Chapter 3, Using Linux and Linux Tools for Network Diagnostics), and translates them into Internet Protocol (IP) addresses that can then be used to route the application request at OSI Layers 3 and 4.

In the reverse direction, DNS can also translate an IP address into a fully qualified domain name (FQDN), using what's called a pointer (PTR) request (for a DNS PTR record) or "reverse lookup". This can be important to technical folks, but these requests are not...