As a Red Hat Linux systems manager, you probably wear several hats, one of which is security manager. This is especially true if you work for a small company. Even if you work for a large organization that has a dedicated network or systems security staff, most of the administrators are probably responsible for other operating systems; you’re probably responsible for security policies on your Linux systems. | RHCE RED HAT CERTIFIED ENGINEER 10 Systems Administration and Security CERTIFICATION OBJECTIVES Q A Configuring NIS Clients Basic Host Security The Pluggable Authentication Module PAM System System Logging The Extended Internet Services Daemon xinetd Firewall Policies Network Address Translation Two-Minute Drill Self Test 580 Chapter 10 Systems Administration and Security As a Red Hat Linux systems manager you probably wear several hats one of which is security manager. This is especially true if you work for a small company. Even if you work for a large organization that has a dedicated network or systems security staff most of the administrators are probably responsible for other operating systems you re probably responsible for security policies on your Linux systems. You may spend very little time thinking about Linux security or it may turn out to be a full-time job. For most Linux systems administrators the amount of time spent on securing systems falls somewhere between these two extremes. The level of security you choose to configure depends on many factors including the purpose of the system and the overall security policies of your company or organization as well as the size and number of computers in the company. For example a Red Hat Linux system at home does not require as much security as a Red Hat Linux server that is being used to process credit card orders for a Web site. Red Hat Linux comes with a large and varied assortment of tools for handling security. This includes tools for managing the security on individual Linux computers and tools for managing security for an entire network of systems both Linux and otherwise. In this chapter we look at some of the tools Red Hat Linux provides for managing security. We start out by looking at tools for controlling access to individual Linux host systems then we look at tools for securing networks. 1 a You ll need to know how to protect your computer and network.
