If a man can write a better book,

preach a better sermon,

or make a better mouse trap than his neighbor,

though he builds his house in the woods,

the world would eventually make a beaten path to this door.

- Emerson

In the last three articles in this series, we looked at the concept of an Intrusion Detection System (IDS) and its implementation on your network. We discussed some of the top-notch tools like Tripwire and Snort, that you could use as your Swiss army knife in detecting intrusions into your network.

Our failure establishes only this,

that our determination to succeed

wasn't strong enough.

--Bovee

GRUB, unlike LILO, is able to read filesystems and recognize kernel images too. While LILO requires the physical location of the kernel on your drive, GRUB does not. Even the latest filesystem ReiserFS is supported. This means that you don't have to re-install GRUB every time you make a change to the config file or install a new kernel. If your BIOS supports LBA then there is also no problem reading beyond 1024 cylinders. There's some good support for network booting of diskless clients. On the other hand, GRUB installation can be a bit of a problem.

Starters for Linux - Part 2

Ahoy there friends, hope you enjoyed our previous article that briefed you about the Basic Command Line Interface tools available in Linux.

In the previous article of this series we introduced to you some of the essential commands that you should know in order to get started on your Linux box. So if by now you have mastered some of those commands you can go ahead and give yourself a pat on the back ;-).

Under Windows, through network neighborhood, you can browse through available shares on other machines, run applications and of course transfer data. NFS is somewhat similar, but much more flexible. We've got diskless machines on our network that access their root filesystem using NFS. You can centralize the location of user home directories which users access via NFS. Since Linux uses a unified filesystem, it is completely transparent to the user. You can run an application off another machine as though it was installed on your own machine simply by mounting that directory using NFS.

Most persons would succeed in small things if they were not troubled with great ambitions- H.W. Longfellow.

In the first part of this series we had a laid the ground work that took us a step further towards understanding the necessity of a full fledged Intrusion Detection system (IDS). A good policy is to mix and match the best to form a security grid that should be difficult enough even for the expert cracker to penetrate. The various IDS systems of interest to us throughout this series will be purely Tripwire and Snort.

The Prince of darkness is a gentleman- Shakespeare, King Lear, III, 4

Starters for Linux - Part 1

Among our wonderful readers we bet there are some of you who would like to get to know a lot more about Linux but have nowhere to go or should we say, just too confused as to where to start. This series aim at helping you novices get a firm grip on the basics of Linux.

In a previous article, we saw how versatile the boot loader 'LILO' was. This session we get more technical and look at the internals of LILO, its primary boot time operation, functionality and a few nifty little arguments that can help us tune up our LILO installation. One of the plus points of LILO is that it is filesystem independent. It is able to boot operating systems from Microsoft, OS/2, SCO Unix, Unixware, PC-DOS to Linux.

The concept of a remote desktop is very common among Unix networks. The design of the X server allows you to sit at one machine and work on another and access the entire range of GUI applications. The trouble, however, with the X-terminal setup is the high bandwidth connection that is required, restricting their usage to a local network. In contrast, VNC (Virtual Network Computing) offers the same functionality but will work over low-bandwidth connections too. VNC will even work over the Internet.