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

Configuring and building a kernel


The need to configure the kernel could arise due to many reasons. We may want to resize the kernel to run only the necessary services, or we may have to patch it to support new hardware that was not supported earlier by the kernel. This could be a daunting task for any system administrator, and in this section, we take a look at how we can configure and build the kernel.

Getting ready

It is always recommended that you have ample space for kernels in the boot partition of any system. We can either choose the whole disk install option or set aside a minimum of 3 GB of disk space for the boot partition.

After installing the Linux distribution and configuring development packages on the system, enable the root account as well as sudo for our user account.

Now, before we start with the installation of any packages, run the following command to update the system:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade

After this, check whether the build-essential package...