When Olaf joined the Linux Documentation Project in 1992, he wrote two
small chapters on UUCP and smail, which he meant to
contribute to the System Administrator's Guide. Development of TCP/IP
networking was just beginning, and when those “small chapters”
started to grow, he wondered aloud whether it would be nice to have a
Networking Guide. “Great!” everyone said. “Go for it!”
So he went for it and wrote the first version of the Networking Guide, which
was released in September 1993.
Olaf continued
work on the Networking Guide and eventually produced a much enhanced
version of the guide. Vince Skahan contributed the original
sendmail mail chapter, which was completely
replaced in this edition because of a new interface to the
sendmail configuration.
The version of the guide that you are reading now is a revision and
update prompted by O'Reilly & Associates and undertaken by Terry
Dawson.[1]
Terry has been an amateur radio operator for over 20 years and has
worked in the telecommunications industry for over 15 of those. He was
co-author of the original NET-FAQ, and has since authored and
maintained various networking-related HOWTO documents. Terry has
always been an enthusiastic supporter of the Network Administrators
Guide project, and added a few new chapters to this version describing
features of Linux networking that have been developed since the first
edition, plus a bunch of changes to bring the rest of the book up to
date.
The exim chapter was contributed by
Philip Hazel,[2]
who is a lead developer and maintainer of the package.
The book is organized roughly along the sequence of steps you have to
take to configure your system for networking. It starts by discussing
basic concepts of networks, and TCP/IP-based networks in particular.
It then slowly works its way up from configuring TCP/IP at the device
level to firewall, accounting, and masquerade configuration, to the
setup of common applications such as rlogin and
friends, the Network File System, and the Network Information
System. This is followed by a chapter on how to set up your machine as
a UUCP node. Most of the remaining sections is dedicated to two major
applications that run on top of TCP/IP and UUCP: electronic mail and
news. A special chapter has been devoted to the IPX protocol and the
NCP filesystem, because these are used in many corporate environments
where Linux is finding a home.
The email part features an introduction to the more intimate parts of
mail transport and routing, and the myriad of addressing schemes you
may be confronted with. It describes the configuration and management
of exim, a mail transport agent ideal for use in most
situations not requiring UUCP, and sendmail, which is for
people who have to do more complicated routing involving UUCP.
The news part gives you an overview of how Usenet news works. It covers
INN and C News, the two most widely used news transport software packages
at the moment, and the use of NNTP to provide newsreading access to a local
network. The book closes with a chapter on the care and feeding of the most
popular newsreaders on Linux.
Of course, a book can never exhaustively answer all questions you
might have. So if you follow the instructions in this book and
something still does not work, please be patient. Some of your
problems may be due to mistakes on our part (see the section Section 9", later in this Preface), but they also may be caused by changes
in the networking software. Therefore, you should check the listed
information resources first. There's a good chance that you are not
alone with your problems, so a fix or at least a proposed workaround
is likely to be known. If you have the opportunity, you should also
try to get the latest kernel and network release from one of the Linux
FTP sites or a BBS near you. Many problems are caused by software
from different stages of development, which fail to work together
properly. After all, Linux is a “work in progress.”
