Squeaky newbie

[Burke, Thomas G.]

First thing you need to is get all the updates from redhat's site & save them somewhere on your machine.  There's a ton of them, and many are security related.  Do it, and do it now.  You are officially a vulnerable box, if you're online.
 
Next, turn off all unecessary services, see above, you're vulnerable.
 
Next, put together a good firewall.  6.x uses ipchains - a good example can be found at http://tomii.dnsalias.com/firewall.txt - it's mine, feel free to plagiarize, but you need to learn what it all means, so you can customize for your needs.
 
Install portsentry, logwatch, logcheck, and anything else you can come up with to send you logs of your machine's goings on, so you can keep up to date - you want to know, as a linux box is a prime target to those 133ts (morons), as they can open a shel account on your machine & use it to attack others' machines.
 
If you're using the machine as a mail server, 6.x's default sendmail install has relaying automatically allowed, so read up on how to turn off relaying (or allow relaying only to necessary machines) - otherwise, spammers will hijack your server & make it look like *you* are sending the spam.
 
There's more, but we can get to it later...  Be paranoid, they really are out to get you.
 
    -Tom

-----Original Message-----
From: redhat-list-bounces at redhat.com [mailto:redhat-list-bounces at redhat.com]On Behalf Of Tom McCaffrey
Sent: Thursday, May 26, 2005 12:17 PM
To: RedHat
Subject: Squeaky newbie



Years ago, (maybe three or four?) I purchased RedHat 6.0 but never installed it. 
Today I decided to give it a shot and did manage to install it (server version) and 
got it to boot up and even logged in successfully as root. 
But.. this is all I've done. Don't know where to go from this point and the manuals I 
got with the program are... well... manuals. 
What I am wondering is if anyone knows where I might find a tutorial that will skip 
all the blather and enlighten me as to how to set this thing up - with security. 

The computer is an old Ultra, 450 Mhz with 320 MB Ram and a 10-gig HD. 
There is a Kingston 10/100 in it although the install called it something else (I forget) but 
appears to work. 
I have it set to dhcp (I am on a network here where I work). 

I have always been a dos/windows (all flavors) user and very briefly messed with BSD Unix 
just a scoush. Not installing it - but just using the system prompt.. Pine and just enough other 
commands to be dangerous. 

Thanks you for suffering my newness and TIA for any info 

Tom 
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