Linux Administrator's Security Guide
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Preface

By Kurt Seifried [email protected]

About this book

I wrote this book originally because no Linux security documentation existed back in the late 1990's. Since then several Linux security books have been published, but in general they all have shortcomings (for example one of them spends 40 pages on cops, a largely obsolete tool). So anyways I've decided it's time to update the book, which is one major advantage of doing this on the www. Currently it is April 2001, I'm hoping the major rewrite will be done by fall or winter of 2001 and then the LASG can go back into "maintenance" mode for a while. Writing the preface is boring so I'm gonna stop here and you can go read the book itself.

Acknowledgements

I'd like to thank my family for being supportive and putting up with me.

Contacts and mailing lists

You can contact the author directly at: [email protected].

Typographical conventions

Since this is rapidly approaching "real book status" I decided it was time to format it nicely.

Chapter Title - H1

Only one chapter title per chapter (individual files), linked from TOC.

Section Title H2

Multiple section titles per chapter, linked from TOC

SubSection Title H3

Bold	Hostnames, Usernames, IP's, UID/GID's
Italic	file and directory names, program and command names, command-line options, email addresses and pathnames, site names and new terms.
Formatted	Examples of commands
Formatted Italic	variable options, keywords, text the user replaces with their value
Formatted Bold	commands and text to be literally typed by the user

Bugs and errata

The beauty of this book is that it is available online, thus bugs and errata are done in real time. What you read is generally the most up to date version. If you find a problem please tell me, [email protected].

Dates, times and other conventions

This book refers to dates and times in numerous places. Unfortunately there are no universally used conventions for simple things like writing dates, which is rather annoying. I have decided to use "international" standards as opposed to American/Canadian standards, while this may cause some confusion it makes sense to me.

Dates

Dates will be written using the ISO standard of Day first, then the month, and finally the year. For example the date August 21, 2001 would be written:

21/8/2001

Long dates will be written the day first, then the month, then the date and finally the year. For example the date August 21, 2001 would be written:

Tuesday, August 21, 2001

Times

Time references are in GMT unless otherwise noted. References to duration are in the form hours, minutes and seconds (HH:MM:SS). A time of one hour, twenty minutes and thirty seconds would be written:

1:20:30

Encryption keys

SSL certificate thumbprints:

https://www.seifried.org/ certificate thumbprint:

27D6 D2B8 D30D 003A BF5B 8405 380C 8BE3 DC6F 5204

https://lists.seifried.org/ certificate thumbprint:

E3F2 CCF6 3545 F6BC 5844 7719 16BB D917 64B4 6E76

PGP key for Kurt Seifried.

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Linux Administrator's Security Guide
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