November 2007
Beginner
642 pages
15h 43m
English
Content preview from Linux Networking CookbookBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
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19.1. Building a Network Diagnostic and Repair Laptop
Problem
You want to set up an old laptop as a portable network diagnostic station. What should you have on it?
Solution
This is a fine and endlessly useful thing to have. It doesn't have to be a super-duper brand-new laptop; any one of reasonably recent vintage that supports USB 2.0 and Linux will do. It should have:
Two wired Ethernet interfaces and one wireless
Modem
USB 2.0 ports
Serial port
Serial terminal
Most laptops don't have a serial port, so you can use a USB-to-serial adapter instead.
Another great thing to have is a PATA/SATA-to-USB 2.0 adapter for rescuing failing hard drives. This lets you plug in either 2.5" or 3.5" PATA or SATA hard drives, and then do a direct copy to save your data. Use the excellent GNU ddrescue utility for this. If your primary hard drive isn't big enough to hold the data, hook up a second one with another PATA/SATA-to-USB 2.0 adapter, or copy it over your network. Why not just copy it over the network in the first place? Because a failing drive is going to take the networking stack down along with everything else.
Install whatever Linux distribution you want, and these applications:
- OpenSSH
Secure remote administration.
- sshfs
Securely mount remote filesystems.
- telnet
Insecurely login to servers; useful for several kinds of tests.
- Nmap
Port scanner and network exploration.
- tcptraceroute; traceroute
Show routes taken to other hosts.
- tcpdump; Wireshark
Packet sniffers.
- Netstat
Show listening and connected ports.
- netstat-nat ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
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I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.