Book Image

Mastering CentOS 7 Linux Server

By : Mohamed Alibi, BHASKARJYOTI ROY
Book Image

Mastering CentOS 7 Linux Server

By: Mohamed Alibi, BHASKARJYOTI ROY

Overview of this book

Most server infrastructures are equipped with at least one Linux server that provides many essential services, both for a user's demands and for the infrastructure itself. Setting up a sustainable Linux server is one of the most demanding tasks for a system administrator to perform. However, learning multiple, new technologies to meet all of their needs is time-consuming. CentOS 7 is the brand new version of the CentOS Linux system under the RPM (Red Hat) family. It is one of the most widely-used operating systems, being the choice of many organizations across the world. With the help of this book, you will explore the best practices and administration tools of CentOS 7 Linux server along with implementing some of the most common Linux services. We start by explaining the initial steps you need to carry out after installing CentOS 7 by briefly explaining the concepts related to users, groups, and right management, along with some basic system security measures. Next, you will be introduced to the most commonly used services and shown in detail how to implement and deploy them so they can be used by internal or external users. Soon enough, you will be shown how to monitor the server. We will then move on to master the virtualization and cloud computing techniques. Finally, the book wraps up by explaining configuration management and some security tweaks. All these topics and more are covered in this comprehensive guide, which briefly demonstrates the latest changes to all of the services and tools with the recent shift from CentOS 6 to CentOS 7.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Mastering CentOS 7 Linux Server
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Summary


This chapter describes in a step-by-step tutorial how to set up a fully-qualified mail server starting from sending a service SMTP using Postfix. We then started organizing the mail server, focusing on sending/receiving mail and virtual domains management via a secure database service MariaDB. Next, we learned about the mail reception service using POP3/IMAP using the MDA Dovecot with a medium level of security provided by the service itself. Then to start the extension part, which shows when the server can connect to an LDAP server and can gather useful information about the users and use them to send and receive mail. Finally, we finished off with a customized security level using OpenSSL to generate new certificate and keys to secure the service's authentication and encryption of the e-mails to be sent.

In the next chapter, we will learn how to set up and configure tools such as Nagios and syslog-ng on CentOS to monitor different services, and collect and process logs.