Overview
Your Official Red Hat Linux Guide to FirewallsReviewed and approved by the experts at Red Hat, this comprehensive reference guide gives you all the tools to construct firewalls on a Red Hat server that will lock out intruders and defend your network against attacks.
Red Hat Linux expert and IT professor Bill McCarty begins by giving you a solid foundation in security technology and philosophy. You'll examine the importance of perimeter security and the central role packet-filtering firewalls play, understand the network traffic patterns associated with common Internet services, and explore ways to develop firewall policies that permit, prohibit, or restrict use. With this groundwork in place, you then discover how to cost-justify, design, implement, test, and operate packet-filtering firewalls constructed with Red Hat Linux. You'll also gain valuable information about related topics, such as implementing bastion hosts and detecting network intrusion.
This guidebook arms you with everything you need to secure your Red Hat Linux system with state-of-the-art firewalls.
Proven Security Solutions with Red Hat Linux Firewalls
- Examine the migration from ipchains in earlier releases of Red Hat Linux to the iptables in Red Hat Linux 8
- Manage iptable log files
- Customize firewalls produced with lokkit
- Learn how to use Red Hat Linux with the traditional bastion host firewall setup
- Discover IP masquerading, network address translation, and other advanced Red Hat firewall features
- Study firewalls and firewall administration techniques that work "out of the box" on Red Hat Linux systems
- Gain a working knowledge of firewall design, implementation, and administration
Editorials
From Barnes & Noble
The Barnes & Noble ReviewAs one security guru has observed, “The only truly secure system is one that is powered off, cast in a block of concrete, and sealed in a lead-lined room with armed guards.” Not viable in your environment? The next best thing is a carefully configured firewall. But you could spend a fortune on a commercial solution, and without a real understanding of its behavior and limitations, you’ll just be fooling yourself.
So if there’s no “magic box” you can just plug in without learning stuff, why not save a fortune and build yourself a dirt-cheap firewall with Red Hat Linux? Red Hat Linux Firewalls will show you how, from start to finish.
Fully reviewed by Red Hat, this is a single authoritative source for everything involved in designing, building, and managing your firewall. No more struggling with iptables man pages. No more using Google to find and wade through incomprehensible instructions from folks who can’t write in English. Bill McCarty wrote Linux magazine’s "Newbies" column. He can explain Linux so anyone will understand it. (Even better, having worked with Linux since kernel 0.99, he’s able to give you fully Red Hattweaked code and configurations that work right from the start.)
McCarty begins with an overview of firewalls in general. He explains how firewalls are intended to prevent attacks by filtering traffic to support security policies, blocking any traffic inconsistent with security policies, logging attempted and actual access to hosts and networks, and alerting administrators whenever an attack is suspected. He introduces filtering by IP address and type of service; then shows how firewalls are often deployed in combination -- as in the case of an outer firewall protecting a web server and an inner firewall protecting LAN clients from attack if the web server is compromised.
Next, he considers the three types of firewalls -- personal firewalls such as those often used to protect computers linked to DSL or cable modem lines; enterprise firewalls that are used to protect very large companies but tend to be quite idiosyncratic in deployment; and departmental firewalls, which are ideal for a wide range of businesses and organizations. While this book can help you build any type of firewall you want, McCarty focuses most of his attention on departmental firewalls -- which can protect far more computers and provide a far greater variety of services than personal firewalls, and do so with less complexity than enterprise firewalls.
After introducing firewalls, McCarty reviews all the TCP/IP networking concepts you need to make your Linux firewall work correctly: basic TCP/IP configuration and troubleshooting tools (such as ifconfig, traceroute, nslookup, netstat, tcpdump, and so forth); the principal files specifying TCP/IP configuration in Red Hat Linux systems; and a simple TCP/IP troubleshooting procedure for pinpointing firewall-related problems when they arise.
(If you’re building your first firewall, once you’ve read this material, you might briefly jump ahead to Chapter 11, in which McCarty shows how to securely install and configure Red Hat Linux so that it can serve as a well-protected “bastion host” for your firewall.)
Before diving into Red Hat Linux firewall configuration, McCarty describes the characteristics of network traffic and commonly-used TCP/IP application protocols you need to know in order to design and operate any packet-filtering firewall effectively -- using Red Hat Linux or any other operating system or firewall hardware.
In Part II, McCarty moves on to Red Hat Linuxbased firewall design and implementation: how to architect your firewall and design firewall policies that will keep the bad guys out without unnecessarily interfering with legitimate activities. Most of this section focuses on iptables, the flexible, sophisticated, high-performance stateful firewall that has largely replaced ipchains in the hearts and servers of most Linux professionals. If your organization still prefers ipchains for whatever reason, McCarty covers that as well -- and if you’re migrating from ipchains to iptables, he shows you how, step by step.
Finally, in Part III, McCarty offers equally thorough coverage of management and administration -- including testing, monitoring, and troubleshooting your firewalls. Follow the instructions in Red Hat Linux Firewalls -- and sleep better at night. Bill Camarda
Bill Camarda is a consultant, writer, and web/multimedia content developer. His 15 books include Special Edition Using Word 2000 and Upgrading & Fixing Networks For Dummies®, Second Edition.