Linux Server Security, Second Edition

This is the Title of the Book, eMatter Edition

Copyright © 2007 O’Reilly & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved.

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Preface

What This Book Doesn’t Cover

This book covers general Linux system security, perimeter (Internet-accessible) net-

work security, and server-application security. Specific procedures, as well as tips for

specific techniques and software tools, are discussed throughout, and differences

between the Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Fedora, SUSE 9, and Debian 3 GNU/Linux

distributions are addressed in detail.

This book does not cover the following topics explicitly or in detail:

• Linux distributions besides Red Hat, Fedora, SUSE, and Debian, although with

regard to application security (which amounts to the better part of the book),

this shouldn’t be a problem for users of Slackware, Turbolinux, etc.

• Other open source operating systems such as OpenBSD (again, much of what is

covered should be relevant, especially application security)

• Applications that are inappropriate for or otherwise unlikely to be found on pub-

licly accessible systems (e.g., Samba)

• Desktop (non-networked) applications

• Dedicated firewall systems (this book contains a subset of what is required to

build a good firewall system)

• Physical security, which admittedly is extremely important but is not in any way

unique to Linux systems

Assumptions This Book Makes

While security itself is too important to relegate ...