Essential Linux Administration: A Comprehensive Guide for Beginners

by Chuck Easttom

ESSENTIAL LINUX ADMINISTRATION: A COMPREHENSIVE GUIDE FOR BEGINNERS introduces you to the various aspects of Linux administration. Each chapter is designed to give you an overview of a specific topic, along with some practical "how-to" material that you can apply immediately. The first three chapters set the stage, providing an overview of operating system concepts, Linux history, and instructions for installing Linux for use as a server. The remaining chapters are designed to teach specific administrative tasks. ESSENTIAL LINUX ADMINISTRATION will help you develop the skills you need to be a competent network administrator using Linux.

464 pages, Paperback

First published October 26, 2011

About the author

Chuck Easttom is an internationally renowned computer security expert and trainer. He has been in the IT industry for over 18 years and training for over 10. He has conducted numerous computer security courses over the past decade, most notably for the Secret Service Electronic Crimes Task Force. Students in his classes often include network administrators, corporate chief security officers (CSO’s), federal agents, local law enforcement, military personal, and department of defense contractors. He also has a master’s degree in education as well as a master’s of business administration (specialized in applied computer science) and has been named to both Who’s Who in Education and Whose Who in Science and Technology. He holds over 28 industry certifications including prominent computer security certifications such as CHFI, CISSP, ISSAP, and CEH. In addition to his many certifications he is a Microsoft Certified Trainer and an EC Council certified instructor.

He was part of the teams that created the CompTIA Security+ certification test, as well as their Server+ and Linux+ certification test. He was also part of the CEH version 8 job task analysis team. Chuck also created the EC Councils CAST 615 cryptography course as well as their new Certified Encryption Specialist certification course.


He is the author of 15 computer science books including two computer security textbooks from Pearson publishing that are used at universities around the world. He is also the author of a book specifically on computer crime from Cengage publishing, and most recently a computer forensics textbook from Jones and Barlett publishing.

Chuck has been a speaker on various computer security related topics including the following: the Harvard Computer Society (topic the history of computer crime), Columba University ACM Chapter (topic the history of computer viruses), Takedown con (multiple topics all related to cryptography), and Hacker Halted (topic cryptography), and the Southern Methodist University Computer Science and Engineering research colloquium (topic organized computer crime and terrorism).

Reviews

[Jan Spörer · Rating 3 out of 5]

-Functions of an operating system (p. 2):
--Operate the computer’s hardware.
--Provide platform for applications.
-UNIX was initially written in assembly language and rewritten in C in 1972 (also by Bell Labs). (p. 5)
-Linux Torvalds created a UNIX clone and called it Linux. (p. 6)
-Operating system types (p. 7)
--Multi-user
--Multiprocessing
--Multitasking
--Multithreading
-Interrupts: Pathways by which hardware or programs can communicate with the OS. An interrupt is an asynchronous signal (usually from a hardware device) indicating the need for attention or a synchronous event (usually from a program) indicating the need for a change in execution. (p. 8)
-Daemons are called service in Windows. A daemon is a process that runs in the background and starts when the operating system boots. (p. 9)
-OSI model: Framework within which all network operations take place. All seven layers expect for the first layer are implemented in the OS. (pp. 10-11)
--Physical: Cabling and network card, electrical properties, interpretation of the exchanged signals
--Data link: Logical organization of data bits (subdivided into Media Access Control layer and Logical Link Control layer)
--Network layer: Routing information in the network. Addressing occurs here
--Transport layer: End-to-end communication control
--Session layer: Manages dialogue between end-user application processes
--Presentation layer: Handles issues such as syntactical differences in data representation within end-user systems
--Application layer: Connects to application processes
-The Linux kernel (pp. 12-13):
--An operating system kernel is the core of the operating system.
--Low-level input/output, hardware interfacing, memory management, facilitate execution of applications and support those applications such as hardware access and process management.
-GNOME GUI: One of the two most popular GUIs for Linux (next to KDE). (p. 17)
-Journaling file systems keep a record of file transactions so that files can be recovered. There is physical and logical journaling. Logical journaling only stores the changes to a file’s metadata (less robust). (p. 56)
-Microsoft moved to FAT32 with Windows 98 and later recommended the use of NTFS. But FAT can be read by many file systems and makes sense if a computer has both Windows and Linux installed. (p. 58)
-ext is the most important file system for Linux. Was created specifically for Linux. Ext4 is the current version and supports different journaling methods.
-Linux files: An inode is a data structure in the file system that stores all information about a file except the name and the actual data. When a file is referred to by name, the corresponding inode is looked up using the file name. There is a table with file names and inodes. An inode can refer to a file or a folder and is a link to the file. There are two types of links: Hard links that link directly to a specific file. When all references to this link are deleted, the file is deleted. The second type are soft/symbolic links. Here, the link is a pointer to another file or folder (shortcut). (pp. 61-62)
-The /etc folder contains configuration files. (p. 64)
-The /dev folder contains device files. (p. 66)
-The /usr folder contains all subdirectories and all files for all users on the system and documentation. (p. 68)
-A process in the context of OS is an executable that is running in its own memory space. (p. 77)
-It is possible to enable remote desktop access in GNOME. (p. 158)
-Shell scripting: User input can be obtained through read commands or through arguments. (pp. 236-237, 244-245)
-The pipe symbol is used to use the output of one process as the input of another process. (p. 244)
-Script functions use curly braces. Arguments are passed to functions in the same way as arguments are passed to scripts. (pp. 245-246)
-Grep is a search command grep search_term file_name. (p. 247)
-du command shows disk space that the current directory needs. (p. 247-248)
-free command displays memory information. (p. 248)
-dmesg shows all messages that were displayed during bootup. (p. 249)
-In the vi text editor, the user can switch between insert and command modes using ESC and i; q! is used to exit without saving. (pp. 250-252)
-Samba is a server for Windows-based clients that are connected to a Linux machine. (p. 257)
-Domain name services (DNS) translate domain names to IP addresses. (p. 275)
-A web server is a computer that listens to port 80 and responds to the HTTP requests it receives. (p. 317)
-Apache is a robust server that can be used with UNIX-based systems and Windows. (p. 321)
-There are two types of relation instances: Tables (permanently stored data found in a relation) and views (computed data values). (p. 344)
-There are three types of database schemas: Conceptual schemas, logical schemas, and physical schemas. (p. 344)