Book Image

Practical Linux Security Cookbook

By : Michael A Lindner, Tajinder Kalsi
Book Image

Practical Linux Security Cookbook

By: Michael A Lindner, Tajinder Kalsi

Overview of this book

With the growing popularity of Linux, more and more administrators have started moving to the system to create networks or servers for any task. This also makes Linux the first choice for any attacker now. Due to the lack of information about security-related attacks, administrators now face issues in dealing with these attackers as quickly as possible. Learning about the different types of Linux security will help create a more secure Linux system. Whether you are new to Linux administration or experienced, this book will provide you with the skills to make systems more secure. With lots of step-by-step recipes, the book starts by introducing you to various threats to Linux systems. You then get to walk through customizing the Linux kernel and securing local files. Next you will move on to manage user authentication locally and remotely and also mitigate network attacks. Finally, you will learn to patch bash vulnerability and monitor system logs for security. With several screenshots in each example, the book will supply a great learning experience and help you create more secure Linux systems.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Practical Linux Security Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Monitoring logs using MultiTail


For any system administrator, monitoring log files is a very tedious task, and if we have to refer to more than one log file at the same time to troubleshoot any issue, it becomes even more difficult to keep switching between logs.

For such situations, we can use the MultiTail tool, which can help us to take a look at multiple log files in real time. Using MultiTail, we can display multiple log files in a single window or shell, and it will show us the last few lines of the log file in real time.

Getting ready

To use MultiTail, we don't have to set up anything in particular on our Linux system. Only the multitail package needs to be installed. This can be done using this command:

apt-get install multitail

How to do it…

Once the MultiTail tool has been installed, we can start using it as per our requirements using these commands:

  1. If we want to view two log files using multitail, we will run this command:

    multitail /var/log/syslog /var/log/boot.log
    

    We can see that...