Please help a complete beginner

[Tels]

Hi there people...
I'm a Net. Administrator for a Win2000 network based network.
I have just got a RedHat 7.1 box working to test it's potential as a Firewall/router/proxy (I've heard many many good things about Linux's stability and resistance to attack - and it's free-er than the £1500 alternative(based on Linux ha ha ha))

Basically I'm starting to figure a few things out, but I'm quite lost right now.
I need all the help you can pile on me with the following issues:

How does RPM work?
How do ipchains work?
What exactly does it mean to recompile the kernel, how hard is it, how? and why?
Is it possible to share files on a Win2000 network? (I've heard) and what packages do I need to add on?

Even if you know some good links, all the help I can get would be well appreciated.....

Cheers in advance

Tels

 

[d3funct]

RPM is the Redhat Package Manager. It is used to install, remove or verify software packages with a .rpm extension. It is pretty easy to use on the command line (see the manpage for rpm man rpm) or GUI using either gnorpm for GNOME or kpackage for KDE.

Since you're using RedHat 7.1 you'll want to use IPTABLES not IPCHAINS. IPTABLES is stateful and fairly easy to use and setup. For a great tutorial on IPTABLES go to

http://people.unix-fu.org/andreasson/index.html#3.

IPTABLES also goes by the name NETFILTER and is firewalling software.

Recompiling a Kernel means to rebuild your current kernel in order to add modules, drivers or libraries that were not compiled in the default kernel that came with the OS. You'll need to do this to add the modules for serving a firewall (NETFILTER/IPTABLES). You'll also have to do this to add the capability for your OS to translate VFAT and DOS filesystems so you can read them, and to add networking capabilities as well as to ensure you have the proper sound modules and drivers for your sound card and ethernet modules and drivers for your ethernet card(s). Check out the kernel HOW-TO at

http://www.linuxdoc.org

for more details.

You can mount and use Win2K filesystems to your Linux box using Samba. Your distribution CD's should have a Samba RPM on them, or you can download it at

http://www.freshmeat.org.

The Samba homepage is at

http://www.samba.org,

and you can get the full Samba manual from

http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/samba

in html or pdf format for free.

If you'd like to e-mail me I can send you my linux bookmarks which is quite extensive and grouped by subject (documentation, sysadmin, humor, news etc...)

One other good site for help with linux specifically is

http://www.linuxquestions.org

Hope this helps.

d3funct
zimmer.jon@cfwy.com
The software required `Windows 95 or better', so I installed Linux.

 

[Tels]

More questions:
I've installed a few RPM packages, but so far I havn't used any of them bcos I can't find them!

I've still got a lot of the MS-DOS mentality in that I keep traversing directories (none of which make much sense) in order to find executables (few of which I have found)

If I was to install samba (which I have) what do I then do to run it?

I get the impression that insmod is involved here as it is a pretty linux-integrated sort of tool - am I right?

Again, thanks for the assistance - I just moved up a couple of squares (!!)

Tels

 

[ifincham]

Hi,

If you do the command 'rpm -ql samba' (where samba is the name of a rpm) you will see a list of all the files installed from that rpm. (Do 'rpm -ql samba | less' to do it a page at a time). Normally the file that you would call would be installed in /bin , /usr/bin , /usr/local/bin . Like DOS/Windows if the directory is in your path you can just type the command name - otherwise the full path would be needed. If you're using X some packages will create links for kde and or gnome but often they don't and you have to make one yourself if you want to press an icon to run something.

Samba is primarily a server and you would set it to run automatically at the appropriate runlevels (3 multi-user console mode; 5 multi-user x mode). To see what services are stopped and started at various run-levels do:

/sbin/chkconfig --list

To activate samba you'd do :

/sbin/chkconfig --level 2345 smb on
/sbin/chkconfig --level 2345 nmb on

Redhat runlevels are as follows :

0 - halt
1 - Single user mode
2 - Multiuser, without NFS (The same as 3, if you do not have networking
3 - Full multiuser mode
4 - unused
5 - X
6 - reboot

To configure samba make sure you have the 'samba-swat' rpm installed then do '/sbin/chkconfig swat on' and use web browser like this

http://localhost:901

. Login as root and configure away.

insmod (/sbin/insmod) means insert-module. These modules are 'extensions' to the kernel - device drivers, etc., that are not builtin to the kernel itself but are needed for particular hardware, etc. Typically packagers like redhat do not compile things like ethernet drivers into the actual kernel because it would become too large to cover all possibilities. So these are distributed as modules instead and loaded via insmod or modprobe, mostly transparently by the kernel once the config is set up properly.

The main config tool on redhat is linuxconf - command '/sbin/linuxconf' .

Rgds

 

[Tels]

Thanks for your help - it certainly opened a few doors.
I can't find the linuxconf prog, it certainly isn't in the /sbin/ dir.
My other problem is this:
I want to also configure the Linux box here as a router: I have hooked a Win2000 box next to it and I am trying to get a connection to the network thru the Linux box. I have been able to ping both the IP's on the Linux box, but can't ping further than that.. I would like to know what controls routing within Linux, I've looked at the network prop-t's in KDE but nothing I've done has made much difference.

The Linux machine has 2 IP's (multihomed), both private network subnets of 192.168.0.51 and 192.168.4.51

The Win2000 box I am using next door to Linux is 192.168.4.52, I have added routes to this box so it can ping 192.168.0.51 but I cannot ping beyond that

Linux can ping any address either side so I know the hardware is sound. it's a matter of config - PLEASE HELP
because the KDE help files aren't all that (bless em)

PLEASE HELP !!!! !! !
Tels
for pint$ = 1 to 20
for pint$ = pint$ + 1
if pint$ = 20 goto HOME
next pint$

 

[d3funct]

Tels,

Look at the "netstat" manpage and the "route" manpage. A netstat -r will show your routing tables, and netstat -i will show your interfaces. FYI, I don't think linuxconf is automatically installed in 7.1 as it was in previous versions. I notice I don't have it on my 7.1 boxes either and it was previously compiled automatically. Personally I don't use Linuxconf because it uses hooks and such and if you edit a file that was originally setup using linuxconf you can mess up your system. I'd suggest getting "Webmin" from

http://www.webmin.com.

Webmin is a powerful web-based administration interface for Unix systems. Using Webmin you can configure DNS, Samba, NFS, local/remote filesystems and more using your web browser. It's very easy to compile and setup. Once installed open your web browser and enter localhost:10000 for the URL, login and go to work. The thing that's nice about webmin vs. linuxconf is that it is just an interface for editing configuration files but is more orderly where linuxconf is doing things in the background that changes the way some configuration files operate and makes them hard to edit on the command line.
Hope it helps.
d3funct
zimmer.jon@cfwy.com
The software required `Windows 95 or better', so I installed Linux.

 

[ifincham]

Hi,

For linuxconf you need to install the linuxconf rpm. If you don't have it you can download from here -->

http://www.mirror.ac.uk/sites/ftp.r...i386/RedHat/RPMS/linuxconf-1.24r2-10.i386.rpm

.

Install by changing directory to where you downloaded the rpm then (as root) do :

rpm -Uvh linuxconf-1.24r2-10.i386.rpm

Webmin is good but a slight word of caution - it is sponsored by another linux distro (Caldera) and, as you may know, sometimes different distros package things in subtly different ways. So, it may not work out of the box for everything it purports to control.

Regardz

 

[d3funct]

Thanks for the tip about webmin, I didn't realize that. d3funct
zimmer.jon@cfwy.com
The software required `Windows 95 or better', so I installed Linux.

 

[ifincham]

Hi,

On webmin again - I personally have it installed on RH7.1 and the bits I've tried seem to work fine. I think its an excellent tool and I highly recommend it too but I just wanted to make the point that it tries to handle lots of different distros in linux plus Solaris, Aix, etc. and you <may> find a few issues here and there. In other words, from time to time you may need to use the tools provided by the distro so its as well to know those as well!

Rgds

 

[Tels]

You lot are brilliant!! Thanks for good advice. I'm off now to hook my Linux box into the network so I can download those RPMs.

Thanks
!!!! for pint$ = 1 to 20
for pint$ = pint$ + 1
if pint$ = 20 goto HOME
next pint$