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

Common DNS implementations

BIND, also called named (for name daemon), is the DNS tool most often implemented in Linux, and is arguably both the most flexible and complete, as well as the most difficult to configure and troubleshoot. For better or worse, though, it's the service you are most likely to see and to implement in most organizations. The two main implementation use cases are outlined in the next two sections.

DNS Masquerade (dnsmasq) is a competing DNS server implementation. It's commonly seen on network appliances because of its small footprint, but also makes a fine DNS server for a smaller organization. The key advantages to Dnsmasq would include its built-in graphical user interface (GUI) that can be used for reporting, as well as its integration with DHCP (which we'll discuss in the next chapter), allowing DNS registration directly from the DHCP database. In addition, Dnsmasq implements a friendly way to implement DNS blocklists, which are very nicely...