APRESS.COM : Hardening Linux : 9781590594445

By James Turnbull
ISBN13: 978-1-59059-444-5
ISBN10: 1-59059-444-4
584 pp.
Published Feb 2005
Print Book Price: $44.99
eBook Price: $31.49

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Hardening Linux

Hardening Linux by James Turnbull belongs on the shelf of anyone who installs and maintains Linux servers.

— Ray Lodato, Slashdot Contributor

I felt like I learned more about Linux reading this book than I've learned during the last year at work.

— Lasse Koskela, JavaRanch Sheriff

I think Hardening Linux may be the best example I've seen of a practical book on the subject.

— Anomaly - G. Wade Johnson

I was a bit surprised when I scanned the table of contents. The first thought in my head was, 'hey, this has everything in it.' And it does.

— Joe Topjian, Adminspotting.net

"Hardening" is the process of protecting a system and its applications against unknown threats. Hardening Linux identifies many of the risks of running Linux hosts and applications and provides practical examples and methods to minimize those risks. The book is written for Linux/UNIX administrators who do not necessarily have in-depth knowledge of security but need to know how to secure their networks.

In this book, you'll learn how to secure:

The base operating system and firewall with iptables
Connections to your hosts
Fie systems and files
Email servers
IMAP and POP servers
FTP servers

A quick reference of the procedures discussed in each chapter are summarized in Appendix C.

Author Information

James Turnbull

James Turnbull manages the CERT (Computer Emergency Response Team) at the National Australia Bank. He is also a member of Linux Australia, including sitting on the Executive Council in 2008, and is currently on the committee of Linux Users of Victoria.

James has previously worked as an executive manager for IT security at the Commonwealth Bank of Australia, the CIO of a medical research foundation, manager of the architecture group of an outsourcing company, and in a number of IT roles in gaming, telecommunications, and government.

He is a contributor to a number of open source projects and regularly speaks on topics related to writing, systems administration, and open source technologies.

He is the author of three other books:

Pulling Strings with Puppet: Systems Administration Made Easy, about the Ruby-based Puppet configuration management tool.
Hardening Linux, which focuses on hardening Linux bastion hosts including the base operating system, file systems, firewalls, connections, logging, testing your security and securing a number of common applications including e-mail, FTP and DNS.
Pro Nagios 2.0 focuses on enterprise management using the Nagios open source tool.