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									Slackware Linux Basics
For Slackware Linux 10.2

Daniël de Kok

Slackware Linux Basics: For Slackware Linux 10.2 by Daniël de Kok Published Mon Nov 14 07:58:50 CET 2005 Copyright © 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005 by Daniël de Kok License
Redistribution and use in textual and binary forms, with or without modiﬁcation, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:

1. Redistributions of this book must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer. 2. All advertising materials mentioning features or use of this book must display the following acknowledgement: This product includes content written by Daniël de Kok. 3. The name of the author may not be used to endorse or promote products derived from this book without speciﬁc prior written permission.
THIS BOOK IS PROVIDED BY THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND CONTRIBUTORS "AS IS" AND ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE ARE DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE COPYRIGHT OWNER OR CONTRIBUTORS BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS OR SERVICES; LOSS OF USE, DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION) HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, STRICT LIABILITY, OR TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE) ARISING IN ANY WAY OUT OF THE USE OF THIS BOOK, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds. Slackware Linux is a registered trademark of Patrick Volkerding and Slackware Linux, Inc. UNIX is a registered trademark of The Open Group.

Preface ..................................................................................................................................................i I. Getting started..................................................................................................................................i 1. About this book ....................................................................................................................... 1 Availability ........................................................................................................................ 1 Conventions ....................................................................................................................... 1 File names ................................................................................................................ 1 Commands ............................................................................................................... 1 Screen output ........................................................................................................... 1 Notes ........................................................................................................................ 1 2. An introduction to Slackware Linux ....................................................................................... 2 What is Linux? .................................................................................................................. 2 What is GNU/Linux?......................................................................................................... 2 What is Slackware Linux?................................................................................................. 2 The UNIX philosophy ....................................................................................................... 3 Free and open source software .......................................................................................... 3 Slackware Linux 10.2 features .......................................................................................... 3 Getting Slackware Linux ................................................................................................... 4 3. Sources of help........................................................................................................................ 5 On your system.................................................................................................................. 5 Linux HOWTO’s...................................................................................................... 5 Manual pages ........................................................................................................... 5 On the Internet................................................................................................................... 6 alt.os.linux.slackware............................................................................................... 6 4. General concepts ..................................................................................................................... 7 Multitasking....................................................................................................................... 7 Introduction.............................................................................................................. 7 Processes and threads............................................................................................... 7 Filesystem hierarchy.......................................................................................................... 8 Structure................................................................................................................... 8 Mounting.................................................................................................................. 9 Common directories................................................................................................. 9 Devices ............................................................................................................................ 10 Introduction............................................................................................................ 10 ATA and SCSI devices ........................................................................................... 11 5. Installing Slackware Linux ................................................................................................... 12 Booting the installation CD-ROM................................................................................... 12 Partitioning a hard disk.................................................................................................... 12 Installing Slackware Linux.............................................................................................. 14 6. Custom installation ............................................................................................................... 31 Partitioning a hard disk.................................................................................................... 31 Initializing and mounting ﬁlesystems.............................................................................. 31 Installing packages .......................................................................................................... 32 Post-install conﬁguration................................................................................................. 33 fstab........................................................................................................................ 33 LILO ...................................................................................................................... 33 Networking ............................................................................................................ 34 Tuning startup scripts............................................................................................. 34 Conﬁguring the dynamic linker run-time bindings................................................ 35 Setting the root password....................................................................................... 35

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Setting the timezone............................................................................................... 35 Creating the X11 font cache .................................................................................. 36 Automated installation script........................................................................................... 36 II. GNU/Linux Basics ....................................................................................................................... 41 7. The Bash shell ....................................................................................................................... 42 Introduction ..................................................................................................................... 42 Starting the shell .............................................................................................................. 42 Shell basics ...................................................................................................................... 42 Executing commands ............................................................................................. 42 Browsing through shell commands........................................................................ 42 Completion............................................................................................................. 43 Wildcards ............................................................................................................... 43 Matching a string of characters .................................................................... 43 Matching single characters........................................................................... 44 Matching characters from a set .................................................................... 44 Redirections and pipes ........................................................................................... 44 Redirection ................................................................................................... 44 pipes ............................................................................................................. 45 8. Files and directories .............................................................................................................. 46 Introduction ..................................................................................................................... 46 The basics ........................................................................................................................ 46 pwd......................................................................................................................... 46 ls............................................................................................................................. 46 cd............................................................................................................................ 47 mkdir ...................................................................................................................... 47 cp............................................................................................................................ 47 mv .......................................................................................................................... 48 rm ........................................................................................................................... 48 Permissions...................................................................................................................... 48 A short introduction ............................................................................................... 48 chown ..................................................................................................................... 49 chmod..................................................................................................................... 49 Archives........................................................................................................................... 50 Introduction............................................................................................................ 50 Extracting archives................................................................................................. 50 Creating archives.................................................................................................... 51 Extended attributes .......................................................................................................... 52 Introduction............................................................................................................ 52 Installing the necessary utilities ............................................................................. 52 Showing extended attributes .................................................................................. 52 Setting extended attributes ..................................................................................... 52 Mounting ﬁlesystems....................................................................................................... 53 Introduction............................................................................................................ 53 mount ..................................................................................................................... 53 umount ................................................................................................................... 53 The fstab ﬁle .......................................................................................................... 54 fs_spec .......................................................................................................... 54 fs_ﬁle ............................................................................................................ 54 fs_vfstype ..................................................................................................... 54 fs_mntops ..................................................................................................... 54 fs_freq........................................................................................................... 55

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fs_passno ...................................................................................................... 55 Encrypting and signing ﬁles ............................................................................................ 55 Introduction............................................................................................................ 55 Generating your private and public keys ............................................................... 55 Exporting your public key ..................................................................................... 58 Signatures............................................................................................................... 58 Encryption.............................................................................................................. 59 9. Text Utilities.......................................................................................................................... 60 Introduction ..................................................................................................................... 60 The basics ........................................................................................................................ 60 cat........................................................................................................................... 60 echo ........................................................................................................................ 61 wc........................................................................................................................... 61 tr ............................................................................................................................. 61 sort.......................................................................................................................... 62 uniq ........................................................................................................................ 63 10. Process management ........................................................................................................... 64 Introduction ..................................................................................................................... 64 Process basics .................................................................................................................. 64 ps ............................................................................................................................ 64 kill .......................................................................................................................... 65 Advanced process management....................................................................................... 65 Background processes............................................................................................ 66 Stopping processes................................................................................................. 66 Altering priorities................................................................................................... 66 III. Editing and typesetting.............................................................................................................. 68 11. LaTeX.................................................................................................................................. 69 Introduction ..................................................................................................................... 69 Preparing basic LaTeX documents .................................................................................. 69 Minimal document structure .................................................................................. 69 Generating printable formats ................................................................................. 70 Sections .................................................................................................................. 71 Font styles .............................................................................................................. 72 IV. Electronic mail............................................................................................................................ 73 12. Reading and writing e-mail with mutt ................................................................................ 74 Introduction ..................................................................................................................... 74 Usage ............................................................................................................................... 74 Browsing the list of e-mails ................................................................................... 74 Reading e-mails ..................................................................................................... 74 Sending e-mails...................................................................................................... 74 Basic setup....................................................................................................................... 75 Customized headers ............................................................................................... 75 The sendmail binary............................................................................................... 75 Signing/encrypting e-mails.............................................................................................. 75 Introduction............................................................................................................ 76 Conﬁguration ......................................................................................................... 76 Usage...................................................................................................................... 76 13. Sendmail.............................................................................................................................. 77 Introduction ..................................................................................................................... 77 Installation ....................................................................................................................... 77 Conﬁguration................................................................................................................... 77

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Working with mc ﬁles ............................................................................................ 77 Using a smarthost................................................................................................... 78 Alternative host/domain names.............................................................................. 78 Virtual user table .................................................................................................... 78 14. Spamassassin....................................................................................................................... 80 Introduction ..................................................................................................................... 80 Installing spamassasin ..................................................................................................... 80 SpamAssassin ........................................................................................................ 80 Starting spamd ....................................................................................................... 80 Using spamassassin with procmail.................................................................................. 81 Marking messages as spam.................................................................................... 81 Moving spam mail to a separate mailbox .............................................................. 81 V. System administration................................................................................................................. 82 15. User management................................................................................................................ 83 Introduction ..................................................................................................................... 83 Adding and removing users............................................................................................. 83 useradd ................................................................................................................... 83 passwd.................................................................................................................... 84 adduser ................................................................................................................... 84 userdel .................................................................................................................... 85 Avoiding root usage with su ............................................................................................ 85 Restricting su access .............................................................................................. 86 Disk quota........................................................................................................................ 86 Introduction............................................................................................................ 86 Enabling quota ....................................................................................................... 86 Editing quota.......................................................................................................... 87 Getting information about quota............................................................................ 88 16. Printer conﬁguration ........................................................................................................... 89 Introduction ..................................................................................................................... 89 Preparations ..................................................................................................................... 89 Conﬁguration................................................................................................................... 89 Access control ................................................................................................................. 90 Ghostscript paper size...................................................................................................... 91 17. X11...................................................................................................................................... 92 X Conﬁguration ............................................................................................................... 92 Window manager............................................................................................................. 92 18. Package Management.......................................................................................................... 94 Pkgtools ........................................................................................................................... 94 Introduction............................................................................................................ 94 pkgtool ................................................................................................................... 94 installpkg................................................................................................................ 94 upgradepkg............................................................................................................. 94 removepkg.............................................................................................................. 95 Slackpkg .......................................................................................................................... 95 Introduction............................................................................................................ 95 Conﬁguration ......................................................................................................... 95 Importing the Slackware Linux GPG key.............................................................. 95 Updating the package lists ..................................................................................... 96 Upgrading packages............................................................................................... 96 Installing packages................................................................................................. 97 Using rsync...................................................................................................................... 97

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Tagﬁles............................................................................................................................. 98 Introduction............................................................................................................ 98 Creating tagﬁles ..................................................................................................... 98 Using tagﬁles ......................................................................................................... 99 19. Building a kernel ............................................................................................................... 101 Introduction ................................................................................................................... 101 Conﬁguration................................................................................................................. 101 Compilation ................................................................................................................... 102 Installation ..................................................................................................................... 102 Installing the kernel.............................................................................................. 103 Conﬁguring LILO ................................................................................................ 103 20. System initialization.......................................................................................................... 105 The bootloader............................................................................................................... 105 LILO conﬁguration .............................................................................................. 105 LILO installation.................................................................................................. 106 init.................................................................................................................................. 106 Initialization scripts ....................................................................................................... 107 Hotplugging................................................................................................................... 108 Executing scripts on hotplug events..................................................................... 108 21. Security ............................................................................................................................. 111 Introduction ................................................................................................................... 111 Closing services............................................................................................................. 111 Introduction.......................................................................................................... 111 Finding open ports ............................................................................................... 111 inetd...................................................................................................................... 112 22. Miscellaneous.................................................................................................................... 113 Scheduling tasks with cron............................................................................................ 113 Hard disk parameters..................................................................................................... 114 Monitoring memory usage ............................................................................................ 115 vmstat................................................................................................................... 115 VI. Network administration........................................................................................................... 117 23. Networking conﬁguration ................................................................................................. 118 Hardware ....................................................................................................................... 118 Conﬁguration of interfaces ............................................................................................ 118 Conﬁguration of interfaces (IPv6)................................................................................. 119 Introduction.......................................................................................................... 119 Slackware Linux IPv6 support............................................................................. 120 Adding an IPv6 address to an interface ............................................................... 120 Wireless interfaces......................................................................................................... 121 Resolving....................................................................................................................... 122 IPv4 Forwarding ............................................................................................................ 123 24. IPsec .................................................................................................................................. 125 Theory............................................................................................................................ 125 Kernel conﬁguration ...................................................................................................... 125 Installing IPsec-Tools .................................................................................................... 126 Setting up IPsec with manual keying ............................................................................ 126 Introduction.......................................................................................................... 126 Writing the conﬁguration ﬁle............................................................................... 126 Activating the IPsec conﬁguration ....................................................................... 128 Setting up IPsec with automatic key exchanging .......................................................... 128 Introduction.......................................................................................................... 129

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Using racoon with a preshared key ...................................................................... 129 Activating the IPsec conﬁguration ....................................................................... 131 25. The Internet super server................................................................................................... 132 Introduction ................................................................................................................... 132 Conﬁguration................................................................................................................. 132 TCP wrappers ................................................................................................................ 132 26. Apache .............................................................................................................................. 134 Introduction ................................................................................................................... 134 Installation ..................................................................................................................... 134 User directories.............................................................................................................. 134 Virtual hosts................................................................................................................... 134 27. BIND ................................................................................................................................. 136 Introduction ................................................................................................................... 136 Delegation ............................................................................................................ 136 DNS records......................................................................................................... 136 Masters and slaves ............................................................................................... 136 Making a caching nameserver ....................................................................................... 136

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List of Tables
5-1. Alternative kernels....................................................................................................................... 12 7-1. Bash wildcards ............................................................................................................................ 43 8-1. Archive ﬁle extensions ................................................................................................................ 50 9-1. Special tr character sequences..................................................................................................... 61 11-1. LaTeX document classes ........................................................................................................... 70 11-2. LaTeX font styles ...................................................................................................................... 72 18-1. Tagﬁle ﬁelds .............................................................................................................................. 98 20-1. Hotplug device classes ............................................................................................................ 108 23-1. Important IPv6 Preﬁxes........................................................................................................... 120 27-1. DNS records ............................................................................................................................ 136

List of Figures
4-1. Forking a process........................................................................................................................... 7 4-2. The ﬁlesystem structure................................................................................................................. 8 5-1. The cfdisk parition tool ............................................................................................................... 13 5-2. The setup tool .............................................................................................................................. 14 5-3. Setting up the swap partition ....................................................................................................... 14 5-4. Selecting a partition to initialize.................................................................................................. 15 5-5. Formatting the partition............................................................................................................... 15 5-6. Selecting a ﬁlesystem type .......................................................................................................... 16 5-7. Selecting the source medium....................................................................................................... 17 5-8. Selecting the disk sets.................................................................................................................. 17 5-9. Installing the kernel ..................................................................................................................... 18 5-10. Creating a bootdisk.................................................................................................................... 18 5-11. Selecting the default modem ..................................................................................................... 18 5-12. Enabling hotplugging ................................................................................................................ 19 5-13. Selecting the kind of LILO installation..................................................................................... 19 5-14. Choosing the framebuffer resolution......................................................................................... 20 5-15. Adding kernel parameters ......................................................................................................... 20 5-16. Choosing where LILO should be installed................................................................................ 21 5-17. Conﬁguring a mouse ................................................................................................................. 21 5-18. Choosing whether GPM should be started or not...................................................................... 22 5-19. Choosing whether you would like to conﬁgure network connectivity...................................... 22 5-20. Setting the host name ................................................................................................................ 23 5-21. Setting the domain name ........................................................................................................... 23 5-22. Manual or automatic IP address conﬁguration.......................................................................... 24 5-23. Setting the IP addres.................................................................................................................. 24 5-24. Setting the netmask ................................................................................................................... 25 5-25. Setting the gateway.................................................................................................................... 25 5-26. Choosing whether you want to use a nameserver or not ........................................................... 26 5-27. Setting the nameserver(s) .......................................................................................................... 26 5-28. Conﬁrming the network settings ............................................................................................... 27 5-29. Enabling/disabling startup services ........................................................................................... 27 5-30. Choosing whether the clock is set to UTC ................................................................................ 28 5-31. Setting the timezone .................................................................................................................. 28 5-32. Choosing the default window manager ..................................................................................... 29 5-33. Setting the root password .......................................................................................................... 29

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5-34. Finished ..................................................................................................................................... 30 7-1. Standard input and output............................................................................................................ 44 7-2. A pipeline .................................................................................................................................... 45 23-1. The anatomy of an IPv6 address ............................................................................................. 119 23-2. Router example........................................................................................................................ 123

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Preface
This book aims to provide an introduction to Slackware Linux. It addresses people who have little or no GNU/Linux experience, and covers the Slackware Linux installation, basic GNU/Linux commands and the conﬁguration of Slackware Linux. After reading this book, you should be prepared to use Slackware Linux for your daily work, and more than that. Thanks to the rapid development of open source software, there are now comprehensive desktop environments and applications for GNU/Linux. Most current distributions and books focus on using GNU/Linux with such environments. I chose to ignore most of the graphical applications for this book, and tried to focus this book on helping you, as a reader, to learn using GNU/Linux in a more traditional UNIX-like way. I am convinced that this approach is often more powerful, and helps you to learn GNU/Linux well, and not just one distribution or desktop environment. The UNIX philosophy is described in the section called The UNIX philosophy in Chapter 2. I wish everybody a good time with Slackware Linux, and I hope that you will ﬁnd this book is useful for you. Daniël de Kok

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I. Getting started

Availability
This book was written in DocBook/XML, and converted to HTML and PDF with Jade. The latest version of the book is always available from: http://www.slackbasics.org/.

Conventions
This section gives a short summary of the conventions in this book.

File names
File or directory names are printed as: /path/to/file. For example: /etc/fstab

Commands
Commands are printed as bold text. For example: ls -l

Screen output
Screen output is printed like this:
Hello world!

If commands are being entered in the screen output the commands will be printed as bold text:
$command Output If a command is executed as root, the shell will be displayed as “#”. If a command is executed as a normal non-privileged user, the shell will be displayed as “$”.

Notes
Some sections contain extra notes. It is not necessary to know the information in notes, but notes may provide valuable information, or pointers to information. Notes are printed like this:
Note: This is a note.

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Chapter 2. An introduction to Slackware Linux
What is Linux?
Linux is a UNIX-like kernel, which is written by Linus Torvalds and other developers. Linux runs on many different architectures, for example on IA32, IA64, Alpha, m68k, SPARC and PowerPC machines. The latest kernel and information about the Linux kernel can be found on the Linux kernel website: http://www.kernel.org The Linux kernel is often confused with the GNU/Linux operating system. Linux is only a kernel, not a complete operating system. GNU/Linux consists of the GNU operating system with the Linux kernel. The following section gives a more extensive description of GNU/Linux.

What is GNU/Linux?
In 1984 Richard Stallman started an ambitious project with the goal to write a free UNIX-like operating system. The name of this system is GNU, which is an acronym of “GNU’s Not UNIX”. Around 1990, all major components of the GNU operating system were written, except the kernel. Two years earlier, in 1988, it was decided that the GNU project would use the Mach 3.0 microkernel as the foundation of its kernel. However, it took until 1991 for Mach 3.0 to be released under a free software license. In the the same year Linus Torvalds started to ﬁll the kernel gap in the GNU system by writing the Linux kernel. GNU/Linux thus refers to a GNU system running with the GNU/Linux kernel. The GNU kernel, named “HURD” was still under development when this book was written, and is available as the GNU/HURD operating system. There are some other kernels that are ported to the GNU operating system as well. For instance, the Debian project has developed a version of the GNU operating system that works with the NetBSD kernel.

What is Slackware Linux?
Slackware Linux is a GNU/Linux distribution, which is maintained and developed by Patrick Volkerding. A distribution is a coherent collection of software that provides a usable GNU/Linux system. Volkerding started using GNU/Linux because he needed a LISP interpreter for a project. At the time the dominant GNU/Linux distribution was Softlanding System Linux (SLS Linux). Slackware Linux started out as a private collection of Volkerding’s patches for SLS Linux. The ﬁrst publicly available Slackware Linux release was 1.0, which was released on July 16, 1993. In contrast to many other GNU/Linux distributions, Slackware Linux adheres to the so-called KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) principle. This means that Slackware Linux does not have complex graphical tools to conﬁgure the system. As a result the learning curve of Slackware Linux can be high for inexperienced GNU/Linux users, but it provides more transparency and ﬂexibility. Besides that you get a deeper understanding of GNU/Linux with no-frills distributions like Slackware Linux. Another distinguishing aspect of Slackware Linux, that also “complies” with the KISS principle, is the Slackware Linux package manager. Slackware Linux does not have a complex package manager like RPM or dpkg. Packages are normal tgz (tar/gzip) ﬁles, often with an additional installation script and a package description ﬁle. For novice users tgz is much more powerful than RPM, and avoids dependency problems. Another widely known feature of Slackware Linux are its initialization

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Chapter 2. An introduction to Slackware Linux scripts. In contrast to most other GNU/Linux distributions Slackware Linux does not have a directory for each runlevel with symbolic links to services that have to be started or killed in that runlevel. It uses a simpler approach in which you can enable or disable services by twiddling the executable bit of an initialization script. The packages in Slackware Linux are compiled with as little modiﬁcations as possible. This means you can use most general GNU/Linux documentation.

The UNIX philosophy
Since GNU/Linux is a free reimplementation of the UNIX operating system, it is a good idea to look at the philosophy that made UNIX widely loved. Doug McIlroy summarized the UNIX philosophy in three simple rules:
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Write programs that do one thing and do it well. Write programs to work together. Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a universal interface.

Odds are that you do not intend to write programs for GNU/Linux. However, even as a user these basic UNIX rules can mean a lot to you. Once you get to know the essential commands that have been part of UNIX for many years, you will be able to combine simple programs to solve complex problems. Keep this in mind while you learn Slackware Linux; try to get a feeling for how you can divide complex tasks in simple combined operations.

Free and open source software
Most packages in Slackware Linux are published under a free software or open source license. Under these licenses software may be used, studied, changed and distributed freely. Practically, this means that the software is available and redistributable in source and binary form. Although the free software and open source software movements share many licenses and principles, there are subtle differences between both movements. The open source movement tends to focus on the economic and technical advantages of sharing source code, while the free software movement puts accent on the ethical side of providing sources and binaries freely. As the GNU website puts it: “Free software is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of free as in free speech, not as in free beer. 1” In the spirit of free and open source software the source code of almost all packages is included on the third and fourth CDs in the Slackware Linux CD set.

Slackware Linux 10.2 features
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Linux 2.4.31 - Slackware Linux uses the proven 2.4 Linux kernel as the default kernel. Slackware Linux 10.2 provides Linux 2.6.13 as an option. When a 2.6 kernel is booted, Slackware Linux will automatically use udev, which is a daemon that automatically generates /dev device entries. X11R6.8.2 - This is the second Slackware Linux to provide the X Window System provided by the X.org Foundation.

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Chapter 2. An introduction to Slackware Linux
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GCC 3.3.6 - Version 3.3.6 of the GNU Compiler Collection is provided. GCC provides C, C++, Objective-C, Fortran-77, and Ada 95 compilers. The K Desktop Environment (KDE) 3.4.2 - The full KDE environment is provided, which includes KOfﬁce, the Konqueror web browser, multimedia programs, development tools, and many more useful applications. XFce 4.2.2 - XFce is a lightweight desktop environment based on GTK2. It embodies the UNIX spirit of modularity and re-usability. glibc support for NPTL - NPTL (Native POSIX Thread Library) is a threading implementation that replacess linuxthreads. In combination with a 2.6 Linux kernel, threading performance can improve dramaticly. Linuxthreads is still available for compatibility and 2.4 kernels.

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Getting Slackware Linux
Slackware Linux is freely downloadable from the ofﬁcial Slackware Linux mirrors. The list of Slackware mirrors is available at http://www.slackware.com/getslack/ You can also order Slackware Linux as a CD set from the Slackware Store. Many Internet shops also provide Slackware Linux cheaply on CD-ROM, but you are only supporting Slackware Linux ﬁnancially if you buy an ofﬁcial CD set. The Slackware Store also offers Slackware Linux subscriptions. A subscriber automatically receives new Slackware Linux releases at a reduced price. If you would like to have more information about purchasing Slackware Linux, visit the Slackware Store website at http://store.slackware.com/

Notes
1. http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html

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Chapter 3. Sources of help
Linux HOWTO’s
The famous Linux HOWTOs are a collection of documents which cover speciﬁc parts of a GNU/Linux system. Most HOWTOs are distribution independent, and therefore very useful for using them with Slackware Linux. The "linux-howtos" package in from the “f” disk set contains the HOWTO collection. After installing this package the HOWTOs can be found in the /usr/doc/Linux-HOWTOs/ directory. Slackware Linux also contains a collection of Mini-HOWTOs, which are shorter and cover narrower topics. The Mini-HOWTOs can be found in the /usr/doc/Linux-mini-HOWTOs/ directory after installing the “linux-mini-howtos” package.

Manual pages
Most UNIX-like commands are covered by the a traditional *nix help system called the manual pages. You can read the manual page of a program by using the man command. Executing man with the name of the command as a parameter shows the manual page for that command. For example:
$man ls If you do not know the exact name of a manual page or command, you can search a page using the keyword (-k) parameter:$ man -k routing NETLINK_ROUTE [rtnetlink] netstat (8) route (8) routed (8) rtnetlink (7)

(7) - Linux IPv4 routing socket - Print network connections, routing tables, interface statisti - show / manipulate the IP routing table - network routing daemon - Linux IPv4 routing socket

We have to add that there are also manual pages that cover other things than commands. These sections of manual pages are available:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Executable programs or shell commands System calls (functions provided by the kernel) Library calls (functions within program libraries) Special files (usually found in /dev) File formats and conventions eg /etc/passwd Games Miscellaneous (including macro packages and conventions), e.g. man(7), groff(7) System administration commands (usually only for root) Kernel routines [Non standard]

If you would like to print a manual page to the default printer that you have set up, you can pipe the output of man to the lpr. If the -t of man is used man will output the manual page in Postscript

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Chapter 3. Sources of help format, rather than ASCII. For example, you could use the following command to print the tar manual page:
$man -t tar | lpr On the Internet alt.os.linux.slackware alt.os.linux.slackware is a Slackware Linux newsgroup. You can read newsgroups with a newsreader like tin or knode. Be careful: it is expected that you have read all necessary documentation before posting to this newsgroup. If you have not the chance of getting “ﬂamed” is really big. 6 Chapter 4. General concepts This chapter gives an introduction to some general UNIX and GNU/Linux concepts. It is a good idea to read this chapter thoroughly if you do not have any UNIX or GNU/Linux experience. Many concepts covered in this chapter are used in this book and in GNU/Linux. Multitasking Introduction One of Linux’ strengths is multi-tasking. Multi-tasking means that multiple processes can run at the same time. You might wonder why this is important to you, because most people are using one application at a time. Besides the more obvious reason that it is just handy to browse while you have a word processor running in the background, multi-tasking is a bare necessity for UNIX-like systems. Even if you have launched no applications there are a bunch of processes running in the background. Some processes might provide network services, others sit there showing a login prompt on other consoles, and there is even a process that executes scheduled tasks. These processes that are running in the background are often called daemon (not to be confused with the word demon, a daemon is a protective angel). At a later stage we are going to look at how you can move processes to the background yourself (see Chapter 10). Note: Note that on single-processor systems processes are not really running simultaneously. In reality a smart scheduler in the kernel is dividing CPU time between processes, giving the illusion that processes are running simultaneously. Processes and threads Applications run as one or more processes. To see what a process actually is we need to know what it consists of. Every process basically has two areas; an area that is named text and an area that is named data. The text area is the actual program code; it is used to tell the computer what to do. The data area is used to store information that the process has to keep. The operating system makes sure that every process gets its time to execute. New processes can be created by duplicating a running process with a system call named fork. Figure 4-1 shows a fork in action schematically. The parent process issues a fork() call, and as a result a new process is created. 7 Chapter 4. General concepts Figure 4-1. Forking a process The problem with processes is that they can get quite large, and that is not very efﬁcient for computers with more than one processor. This problem is solved by duplicating the text area of a process. So, a threaded process is basically a program that has multiple instances of its executing code running, but these instances share the data area of the process (unlike a fork). These threads can be divided over multiple CPUs, making it possible to run one process on more than one CPU simultaneously. Filesystem hierarchy Structure Operating systems store data in ﬁlesystems. A ﬁlesystem is basically a collection of directories that hold ﬁles, like the operating system, user programs and user data. In GNU/Linux there is only one ﬁlesystem hierarchy, this means GNU/Linux doesn’t have multiple drives (e.g. A:, C:, D:), like Windows. The ﬁlesystem looks like a tree, with a root directory (/) which has no parent directory, branches, and leaves (directories with no subdirectories). Directories are separated using the “/” character. 8 Chapter 4. General concepts Figure 4-2. The ﬁlesystem structure Figure 4-2 shows the structure of a ﬁlesystem. You can see that the root directory (/) has two child directories; bin and home. The home directory has two child directories, joe and jack. The diagram shows the full pathname of each directory. The same notation is used for ﬁles. Suppose that there is a ﬁle named memo.txt in the /home/jack directory, the full path of the ﬁle is /home/jack/memo.txt. Each directory has to special entries, “.”, and “..”. “.” refers to the same directory, “..” to the parent directory. These entries can be used for making relative paths. Suppose that you are working in the jack directory. From this directory you can reference to the joe directory with ../joe. Mounting You might have started to wonder how it is possible to access other devices or partitions than the hard disk partition which holds the root ﬁlesystem. Linux uses the same approach as UNIX for accessing other mediums. Linux allows the system administrator to connect a device to any directory in the ﬁlesystem structure. This process is named “mounting”. For example, one could mount the CD-ROM drive to the /cdrom directory. If the mount was correct, the ﬁles on the CD-ROM can be accessed through this directory. The mounting process is described in detail in the section called Mounting ﬁlesystems in Chapter 8. Common directories The Filesystem Hierarchy Standard Group has attempted to create a standard that describes which directories should be available on a GNU/Linux system. Nowadays most major distributions use the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard (FHS) as a guideline. This section describes some mandatory directories on GNU/Linux systems. Please note that GNU/Linux does not have a separate directory for each application (like Windows), ﬁles are ordered by function and type. For example, the binaries for most common user programs are stored in /usr/bin, and their libraries in /usr/lib. This is a short overview of important directories: 9 Chapter 4. General concepts • • • • • • • • • • • • • /bin: essential user binaries that should still be available in case the /usr is not mounted. /dev: device ﬁles. These are special ﬁles used to access certain devices. /etc: the /etc directory contains all important conﬁguration ﬁles. /home: contains home directories for individual users. /lib: essential system libraries (like glibc), and kernel modules. /root: home directory for the root user. /sbin: essential binaries that are used for system administration. /tmp: a world-writable directory for temporary ﬁles. /usr/X11R6: the X Window System. /usr/bin: stores the majority of the user binaries. /usr/lib: libraries that are not essential for the system to boot. /usr/sbin: non-essential system administration binaries. /var: variable data ﬁles, like logs. Devices Introduction In UNIX and Linux almost everything is represented as a ﬁle, including devices. Each GNU/Linux system has a a directory with special ﬁles, named /dev. Each ﬁle in the /dev directory represents a device. You might wonder how this is done; a device ﬁle is a special ﬁle because it has two special numbers, the major and the minor number. The kernel knows which device a device ﬁle represents by these numbers. The following example shows these numbers for a device:$ ls -l /dev/zero crw-rw-rw1 root

root

1,

5 Apr 22

2003 /dev/zero

The ls lists ﬁles and information about ﬁles. In this example information about the /dev/zero device is listed. This particular device has 1 as the major device number, and 5 as the minor device number.
Note: If you have the kernel sources unpacked after installing Slackware Linux, you can ﬁnd a comprehensive list of all major devices with their minor and major numbers in /usr/src/linux/Documentation/devices.txt. An up-to-date list is also available on-line at: ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/docs/device-list/

For the Linux kernel there are two types of devices: character and block devices. Character devices can be read byte by byte, block devices can not. Block devices are read per block (for example 4096 bytes at a time). Whether a device is a character or block device is determined by the nature of the device. For example, most storage media are block devices, and most input devices are character devices. Block devices have one distinctive advantage, namely that they can be cached. This means that commonly read or written blocks are stored in a special area of the system memory, named the cache. Memory is much faster than most storage media, so it is a huge performance beneﬁt to

10

Chapter 4. General concepts perform read and write operations on commonly used blocks in memory. Of course, eventually changes have to be written to the storage medium.

ATA and SCSI devices
There are two categories of devices that we are going to look into in detail, because understanding the naming of these devices can be crucial for partitioning a hard disk, or for mounting. Almost all modern computers use ATA hard disks and CD-ROMs. Under Linux these devices are named in the following way:
/dev/hda /dev/hdb /dev/hdc /dev/hdd master device on the first ATA channel slave device on the first ATA channel master device on the second ATA channel slave device on the second ATA channel

On most computers the hard disk is the master device on the ﬁrst ATA channel (/dev/hda), and the CD-ROM the master device on the second ATA channel. Hard disk partitions have the device name plus a number. For example, /dev/hda1 is the ﬁrst partition on the /dev/hda disk. Most average PCs do not have SCSI hard disks or CD-ROM drives, but SCSI is often used for USB drives. Besides that Serial ATA (SATA) drives are also made available as SCSI disks. For SCSI drives the following notation is used:
/dev/sda - First SCSI disk /dev/sdb - Second SCSI disk /dev/sdc - Third SCSI disk /dev/scd0 - First CD-ROM /dev/scd1 - Second CD-ROM /dev/scd2 - Third CD-ROM

Partitions are notated in the same way as ATA disks; /dev/sda1 is the ﬁrst partition on the ﬁrst SCSI disk.

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Chapter 5. Installing Slackware Linux
Booting the installation CD-ROM
The easiest method for booting the installation system is by using the installation CD-ROM. The Slackware Linux installation CD-ROM is a bootable CD, which means that the BIOS can boot the CD, just like it can boot, for example, a ﬂoppy disk. Most modern systems have a BIOS which supports CD-ROM booting. If the CD is booted when you have the CD inserted in the CD-ROM drive during the system boot, the boot sequence is probably not correctly conﬁgured in the BIOS. Enter the BIOS setup (usually by this can be done by holding the <Del> or <Esc> key when the BIOS screen appears) and make sure the CD-ROM is on the top of the list in the boot sequence. If you are using a SCSI CD-ROM you may have to set the boot sequence in the SCSI BIOS instead of the system BIOS. Consult the SCSI card manual for more information. When the CD-ROM is booted, a pre-boot screen will appear. Normally you can just press <ENTER> to proceed loading the default (bare.i) Linux kernel. If want to install Slackware Linux to a disk that is attached to a SCSI or SATA controller, you have to boot an alternative kernel. You can boot an alternative kernel by entering the kernel name on the prompt, and pressing <ENTER>. The following table lists some of the alternative kernels, for a full list of kernels, refer to the Slackware-HOWTO ﬁle on the CD-ROM. Table 5-1. Alternative kernels Kernel adaptec.s Description This kernel provides support for most Adaptec SCSI controllers, including VLB and EISA models aside from the more modern PCI controllers. This kernel is similar to the bare.i kernel, but provides support for the Advanced Conﬁguration and Power Interface (ACPI). This kernel provides support for some commonly used ATA RAID controllers. This kernel is similar to the bare.i kernel, but provides support for commonly used SATA controllers. These kernels provide support for various SCSI controllers. Refer to the Slackware-HOWTO on the CD-ROM for a list of controllers supported by each kernel.

bareacpi.i

ataraid.i sata.i

scsi.s/scsi2.s/scsi3.s

After booting the installation system, you will be asked whether you are using a special (national) keyboard layout or not. If you have a normal US/International keyboard, which are the most common, you can just press <Enter> at this question. After that the login prompt will appear. Log on as “root”, no password will be requested. After logging on the shell is started, and you can start installing Slackware Linux. The installation procedure will be explained brieﬂy in this chapter.

12

Chapter 5. Installing Slackware Linux

Partitioning a hard disk
Installing Slackware Linux requires at least one Linux partition, creating a swap partition is also recommended. To be able to create a partition there has to be free unpartitioned space on the disk. There are some programs that can resize partitions. For example, FIPS can resize FAT partitions. Commercial programs like Partition Magic can also resize other partition types. After booting the Slackware Linux CD-ROM and logging on, there are two partitioning programs at your disposal: fdisk and cfdisk. cfdisk is the easiest of both, because it is controlled by a menu interface. This section describes the cfdisk program. To partition the ﬁrst harddisk you can simply execute cfdisk. If you want to partition another disk or a SCSI disk you have to specify which disk you want to partition (cfdisk /dev/device). An ATA hard disks have the following device naming: /dev/hdn, “n” is replaced by a character. E.g. the “primary master” is named /dev/hda, the “secondary slave” is named /dev/hdd. SCSI disks are named in the following way: /dev/sdn, “n” is replaced by the device character (the ﬁrst SCSI disk = a, the fourth SCSI disk = d). Figure 5-1. The cfdisk parition tool

After starting cfdisk currently existing partitions are shown, as well as the amount of free space. The list of partitions can be navigated with the “up” and “down” arrow keys. At the bottom of the screen some commands are displayed, which can be browsed with the “left” and “right” arrow keys. A command can be executed with the <Enter> key. You can create a Linux partition by selecting “Free Space” and executing the “New” command. cfdisk will ask you whether you want to create a primary or logical partition. The number of primary partitions is limited to four. Linux can be installed on both primary and logical partitions. If you want to install other operating systems besides Slackware Linux that require primary partitions, it is a good idea to install Slackware Linux onto a logical partition. The type of the new partition is automatically set to “Linux Native”, so it is not necessary to set the partition type. The creation of a swap partition involves the same steps as a normal Linux partition, but the type of the partition has to be changed to “Linux Swap” after the partition is created. The suggested size of the swap partition depends on your own needs. The swap partition is used to store programs if the main (RAM) memory is full. If you have a harddisk of a reasonable size, it is a good idea to make a 256MB or 512MB swap partition, which should be enough for normal usage. After creating the partition the partition type can be changed to “Linux Swap”, by selecting the “Type” command. The

13

Chapter 5. Installing Slackware Linux cfdisk program will ask for the type number, “Linux Swap” partitions have type number 82. Normally number 82 is already selected, so you can go ahead by pressing the <Enter> key. If you are satisﬁed with the partitioning you can save the changes by executing the “Write” command. This operation has to be conﬁrmed by entering yes. After saving the changes you can quite cfdisk with the Quit command. It is a good idea to reboot the computer before starting the installation, to make sure that the partitioning changes are active. Press <ctrl> + <alt> + <del> to shut Linux down and restart the computer.

Installing Slackware Linux
The Slackware Linux installer is started by executing setup in the installation disk shell. Setup will show a menu with several choices, you can see a screenshot of the installer in Figure 5-2. Every option has to be completed to do a complete Slackware Linux installation, but once you start the setup guide will guide you through the options. Figure 5-2. The setup tool

The ﬁrst part of the installation is named “ADDSWAP”. The setup tool will look for a partition with the “Linux Swap” type, and ask you if you want to format and activate the swap partition (see ﬁgure Figure 5-3). Normally you can just answer “Yes”.

14

Chapter 5. Installing Slackware Linux Figure 5-3. Setting up the swap partition

After setting the swap up space the “TARGET” menu is launched, which you can see in Figure 5-4. It is used to initialize the Slackware Linux partitions. Setup will display all partitions with the “Linux native” type. Figure 5-4. Selecting a partition to initialize

After selecting one partition, the setup tool will ask whether you want to format a partition or not, and if you want to format it, whether you want to check the disk for bad sectors or not (Figure 5-5). Checking the disk can take a lot of time.

15

Chapter 5. Installing Slackware Linux Figure 5-5. Formatting the partition

After selecting whether you want to ﬁlesystem or not, you can specify which ﬁlesystem should be used (Figure 5-6). Normally you can choose the ext2, ext3 and reiserfs ﬁlesystems. Ext2 was the standard Linux ﬁlesystem for many years, the disadvantage is that Ext2 does not support journaling. A journal is a special ﬁle or area of a partition in which all ﬁlesystem operations are logged. When the system crashes the ﬁlesystem can be repaired rapidly, because the kernel can use the log to see what disk operations were performed. Ext3 is the same ﬁlesystem as Ext2, but adds journaling. Reiserfs is a newer ﬁlesystem, that also provides journaling. Besides that Reiserfs uses balanced trees, which make many ﬁlesystem operations, especially when you are working with many small ﬁles, faster than with Ext2 or Ext3. A disadvantage is that Reiserfs is newer, that is why it can be a bit more unstable. Figure 5-6. Selecting a ﬁlesystem type

The ﬁrst initialized partition is automatically mounted as the root (/) partition. For other partitions the mount point can be selected after the initialization. You could, for example make separate partitions for /, /var, /tmp, /home and /usr. This provides extra protection against crashes. For example the, / partition is barely changed after the installation if you create these partitions. So, on the occasion

16

Chapter 5. Installing Slackware Linux of a crash, the chance that the / partition was in the middle of a write operation is much smaller. The next step is to select the source medium (Figure 5-7). This dialog offers several choices, like installing Slackware Linux from a CD-ROM or installing Slackware Linux via NFS. Most of the times Slackware Linux is installed from CD-ROM, so this is what we are going to look at. After selecting “CD-ROM” you will be asked whether you want to let setup look for the CD-ROM itself (“Auto”) or you want to select the CD-ROM device yourself (“Manual”). If you select “Manual” the setup tool will show a list of devices. Select the device holding the Slackware Linux CD-ROM. Figure 5-7. Selecting the source medium

After choosing an installation source the setup tool will ask you which disk sets (series) you want to install packages from (Figure 5-8). A short description of each disk set is listed. Figure 5-8. Selecting the disk sets

Now it is almost time to start the real installation. The next screen asks how you would like to install. The most obvious choices are “full”, “menu” or “expert”. Selecting “full” will install all packages in the selected disk sets. This is the easiest way of installing Slackware Linux. The disadvantage of this choice is that it can take quite much disk space. The “menu” option will ask you for each disk set

17

Chapter 5. Installing Slackware Linux which packages you want to install. The “expert” option is almost equal to the “menu” option, but allows you to deselect some very important packages from the “a” disk set. After the completion of the installation the setup tool will allow you to conﬁgure some parts of the system. The ﬁrst dialog will ask you where you would like to install the kernel from (see Figure 5-9). Normally it is a good idea to install the kernel from the Slackware Linux CD-ROM, this will select the kernel you installed Slackware Linux with. You can conﬁrm this, or select another kernel. Figure 5-9. Installing the kernel

At this point you can choose to make a bootdisk (Figure 5-10). It is a good idea to make a bootdisk, you can use it to boot Slackware Linux if the LILO conﬁguration is botched. Figure 5-10. Creating a bootdisk

The following dialog can be used to make a link, /dev/modem, that points to your modem device. (Figure 5-11). If you do not have a modem you can select no modem.

18

Chapter 5. Installing Slackware Linux Figure 5-11. Selecting the default modem

The next step is to select whether you would like to use hotplug (Figure 5-12). Hotplug is used for automatically conﬁguring pluggable USB, PCMCIA and PCI devices. Generally speaking it is a good idea to enable hotplugging, but some systems may have problems with the probing of the hotplug scripts. Figure 5-12. Enabling hotplugging

The following steps are important, the next dialogs will assist you with installing LILO, the Linux bootloader. Unless you have experience in conﬁguring LILO it is a good idea to choose to use the simple option for conﬁguration of LILO, which tries to conﬁgure LILO automatically (Figure 5-13).

19

Chapter 5. Installing Slackware Linux Figure 5-13. Selecting the kind of LILO installation

After selecting the simple option the LILO conﬁguration utility will asks you whether you would like to use a framebuffer or not (Figure 5-14). Using a framebuffer will allow you to use the console in several resolutions, with other dimensions than the usual 80x25 characters. Some people who use the console extensively prefer to use a framebuffer, which allows them to keep more text on the screen. If you do not want a framebuffer console, or if you are not sure, you can choose standard here. Figure 5-14. Choosing the framebuffer resolution

After setting the framebuffer you can pass extra parameters to the kernel (Figure 5-15). This is normally not necessary, if you do not want to pass extra parameters you can just press the <Enter> key.

20

Chapter 5. Installing Slackware Linux Figure 5-15. Adding kernel parameters

The last step of the LILO conﬁguration is selecting where LILO should be installed (Figure 5-16). MBR is the master boot record, the main boot record of PCs. Use this option if you want use Slackware Linux as only OS, or if you want to use LILO the boot other operating systems. The Root option will install LILO in the boot record of the Slackware Linux / partition. Use this option if you use another bootloader. Figure 5-16. Choosing where LILO should be installed

You will now be asked to conﬁgure your mouse. Select the mouse type from the dialog that appears (Figure 5-17).

21

Chapter 5. Installing Slackware Linux Figure 5-17. Conﬁguring a mouse

You will then be asked whether the gpm program should be loaded at boot time or not (Figure 5-18). gpm is a daemon that allows you to cut and paste text on the console. Figure 5-18. Choosing whether GPM should be started or not

The next few steps will conﬁgure network connectivity. This is required on almost every networked system. The Slackware Linux setup will ask you if you want to set up network connectivity (Figure 5-19). If you answer “No” you can skip the next few network-related steps.

22

Chapter 5. Installing Slackware Linux Figure 5-19. Choosing whether you would like to conﬁgure network connectivity

You will now be asked to set the hostname (Figure 5-20). Please note that this is not the fully qualiﬁed domain name (FQDN), just the part that represents the host (normally the characters before the ﬁrst dot in a FQDN). Figure 5-20. Setting the host name

After setting the host name you can set the domain name part of the fully qualiﬁed domain name (FQDN) (Figure 5-21).

23

Chapter 5. Installing Slackware Linux Figure 5-21. Setting the domain name

The rest of the network conﬁguration depends on how the IP address is set on the network the machine is connected to. Some networks have a DHCP server that automatically assigns an IP address to hosts in the network. If this is the case for the network the machine select DHCP during this step of the installation (Figure 5-22). When DHCP is selected you will only be asked whether a host name should be sent to the server, normally you can leave this blank. If you use DHCP you can skip the rest of the network conﬁguration described below. If the network does not have a DHCP server you can choose the static IP option, which will allow you to set the IP address and related settings manually. Figure 5-22. Manual or automatic IP address conﬁguration

The ﬁrst step of the manual conﬁguration is to set the IP address of the ﬁrst interface (eth0) of the machine (Figure 5-23).

24

Chapter 5. Installing Slackware Linux Figure 5-23. Setting the IP addres

You will then be asked to set the address of the gateway (Figure 5-25). The gateway is the machine on the network that provides access to other networks by routing IP packets. If your network has no network you can just hit the <ENTER> key.

25

Chapter 5. Installing Slackware Linux Figure 5-25. Setting the gateway

The next dialog will ask you whether you want to use a nameserver or not (Figure 5-26). A nameserver is a server that can provide the IP address for a hostname. For example, if you surf to www.slackbasics.org, the nameserver will “convert” the www.slackbasics.org name to the corresponding IP address. Figure 5-26. Choosing whether you want to use a nameserver or not

If you chose to use a nameserver, you will be given the opportunity to set the IP address of the nameserver (Figure 5-27).

26

Chapter 5. Installing Slackware Linux Figure 5-27. Setting the nameserver(s)

The ﬁnal network settings screen provides an overview of the settings, giving you the opportunity to correct settings that have errors (Figure 5-28). Figure 5-28. Conﬁrming the network settings

After the network conﬁguration you can set which services should be started (Figure 5-29). You can mark/unmark services with the <SPACE> key.

27

Chapter 5. Installing Slackware Linux Figure 5-29. Enabling/disabling startup services

Traditionally the system clock is set to the UTC timezone on UNIX(-like) systems. If this is the case, select Yes during the next step (Figure 5-30). If you also use a non-UNIX(-like) OS on the same system, like Windows, it is usually a good idea to choose No, because some PC operating systems do not work with a separate system clock and software clock. Figure 5-30. Choosing whether the clock is set to UTC

You will then be given the opportunity to select the time zone (Figure 5-31). This is especially important on systems that have their system clock set to UTC, without selecting the correct timezone the software clock will not match the local time.

28

Chapter 5. Installing Slackware Linux Figure 5-31. Setting the timezone

If you installed the X Window System you can now set the default window manager (Figure 5-32). The most basic functionality of a window manager is to provide basic window managing functionality like title bars. But some options, like KDE provide a complete desktop environment. Figure 5-32. Choosing the default window manager

The ﬁnal step is to set the root password (Figure 5-33). The setup will ask you whether you would like to set it or not. There is no reason not to do this, and without a root password your system is dangerously insecure.

29

Chapter 5. Installing Slackware Linux Figure 5-33. Setting the root password

At this point you have completed the Slackware Linux installation. You can now reboot the system to start your fresh new Slackware Linux system. It was not that hard, was is? ;-) Figure 5-34. Finished

30

Chapter 6. Custom installation
Sometimes you may want to do a custom installation of Slackware Linux, for example to learn better how GNU/Linux systems work, or to prepare an automatic installation script. This chapter outlines the steps that are required to install Slackware Linux manually. A sample installation script is also provided in the section called Automated installation script.

Partitioning a hard disk
If you have performed a normal installation, you should not have any problems partitioning a disk. You can use the fdisk and cfdisk commands to partition any disks. If you are scripting the installation of Slackware Linux it is useful to know that you can also pipe fdisk commands to the fdisk binary. For example:
# fdisk /dev/hda << EOF n p 1 +10000M n p 2 +512M t 2 82 w EOF

This would create a primary Linux partition of 10000MB, and a primary Linux swap partition of 512MB. You could also store the fdisk commands into different disk proﬁles, and use one of the proﬁles based on other information (e.g. the disk size). For example:
# cat /usr/share/fdisk-profiles/smalldisk | fdisk

Initializing and mounting ﬁlesystems
After making at least a swap and Linux partition, you can initialize and mount the ﬁlesystems. Especially on systems that are short on memory, it is a good idea to initialize, and use swap ﬁrst. We will use the partition layout listed above in the following examples. To set up and use swap, execute:
# mkswap /dev/hda2 # swapon /dev/hda2

The meaning of these commands is quite obvious. mkswap initializes the swap space, and swapon puts it to use. You will only have to execute mkswap once, but swapon has to be executed during

31

Chapter 6. Custom installation every system boot. This can be done automatically by adding an entry for the swap partition to /etc/fstab, we will do this at a later step. For now, it is important to initialize the target partitions. This can be done with the mkfs command. You can specify which ﬁlesystem should be used by adding the -t parameter. mkfs will automatically invoke a mkfs.ﬁlesystem command, based on the ﬁlesystem you chose. Be aware that the ﬁlesystems that can be used is dependent on the installation kernel that you booted. If you booted the bare.i kernel, you can use the ext3, ext3 and reiserfs ﬁlesystems. To initialize an ext3 ﬁlesystem, and mount it, you should execute the following commands:
# mkfs -t ext3 /dev/hda1 # mount /dev/hda1 /mnt

If you have made separate partitions for certain directories in the root ﬁlesystem, e.g. /home, you can also initialize them and mount them at this point. For example:
# mkfs -t ext3 /dev/hda2 # mkdir /mnt/home # mount /dev/hda2 /mnt/home

Finally, you will have to mount your source media. If you use a CD-ROM, this is easy. Suppose that /dev/hdc is the CD-ROM device node, you can mount the CD-ROM with:
# mount /dev/hdc /var/log/mount

Mounting the installation medium through NFS requires some more steps. First of all, you will have to load the network disk. You can do this by running the network command and inserting a network disk ﬂoppy. You can also load this disk from another medium, for example from an USB memory stick. Suppose that you have mounted a USB memory stick on /var/log/mount, you could load the network disk with: network /var/log/mount/network.dsk. After loading the network disk, you will have to conﬁgure the network interface. If the NFS server is on the same network, you only have to assign an IP address to the network interface. For example, to use the address 192.168.2.201, you could execute the following command:
# ifconfig eth0 192.168.2.201

You can then load the portmapper, which is necessary for the NFS client to function correctly:
# /sbin/rpc.portmap

If the portmapper started correctly, you can ﬁnally mount the NFS volume. Suppose, that you want to mount 192.168.2.1:/home/pub/slackware-current, you could issue the following command:
# mount -r -t nfs -o nolock 192.168.2.1:/home/pub/slackware-current /var/log/mount

If there were no errors when the volume was mounted, it should be accessible through
/var/log/mount

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Chapter 6. Custom installation

Installing packages
Everything is now set up to start installing packages from the installation medium. Since installpkg is available during the installation, you can use it to install Slackware Linux packages. To install it to the target partition(s) that is mounted on /mnt, add the -root. The following command installs all packages from the source medium:
# installpkg -root /mnt /var/log/mount/slackware/*/*.tgz

If you created tagﬁles to deﬁne which packages should be installed, it is also possible to use them now. Suppose that you have stored a tagﬁle for each disk set in /usr/share/tagfiles/small-desktop, you can install packages based on the tagﬁles in the following manner:

# for p in [a-z]*; do installpkg -root /mnt -tagfile /usr/share/tagfiles/small-desktop/$p/tagfile /var/log/mou done Post-install conﬁguration fstab One of the necessary conﬁguration steps is to create a fstab ﬁle, so that the system can look up what volumes need mounting. The format of the /etc/fstab ﬁle is described in the section called The fstab ﬁle in Chapter 8. As a bare minimum you will have to add entries for the / ﬁlesystem /proc pseudo-ﬁlesystem, the devpts pseudo-ﬁlesystem, and the swap partition. With the sample partitioning used earlier in this chapter, you could create a /etc/fstab like this: # cat > /mnt/etc/fstab << EOF /dev/hda2 swap swap /dev/hda1 / devpts /dev/pts proc /proc ext3 devpts proc defaults 0 0 defaults 1 gid=5,mode=620 0 defaults 0 1 0 0 LILO To make the system bootable you will have to conﬁgure and install the Linux Loader (LILO). The conﬁguration of LILO is covered in the section called The bootloader in Chapter 20. For this section we will just show an example LILO conﬁguration, that can be used with the partition layout described in this chapter. The ﬁrst step is to create the /etc/lilo.conf ﬁle: # cat > /mnt/etc/lilo.conf << EOF boot = /dev/hda vga = normal timeout = 50 image=/boot/vmlinuz root = /dev/hda2 33 Chapter 6. Custom installation label = Slackware read-only EOF You can then install LILO with /mnt as the LILO root. With /mnt as the root, /etc/lilo.conf from the target partition will be used: # lilo -r /mnt Networking Conﬁguration of networking in Slackware Linux is covered in Chapter 23. This section will cover one example of a host that will use DHCP to get an IP address. The /etc/networks ﬁle contains information about known Internet networks. Because we will get network information via DHCP, we will just use 127.0.0.1 as the local network. # cat > /mnt/etc/networks << EOF loopback 127.0.0.0 localnet 127.0.0.0 EOF Since we will get a hostname via DHCP, we will set up a temporary hostname: # cat > /mnt/etc/HOSTNAME << EOF sugaree.example.net EOF Now that we have set up the hostname, we should also take care of making the hostname and localhost resolvable, by creating a /etc/hosts database: # cat > /mnt/etc/hosts << EOF 127.0.0.1 localhost 127.0.0.1 sugaree.example.net sugaree EOF We do not have to create a /etc/resolv.conf, since it will automatically be created by dhcpcd, the DHCP client. So, ﬁnally, we can set up the interface in /etc/rc.d/rc.inet1.conf: # cat > /mnt/etc/rc.d/rc.inet1.conf << EOF IPADDR[0]="" NETMASK[0]="" USE_DHCP[0]="yes" DHCP_HOSTNAME[0]="" EOF 34 Chapter 6. Custom installation Tuning startup scripts The ﬁnal step is to decide which startup scripts should be started. The number of services that are available depends on what packages you have installed. You can get simply get a list of available scripts with ls: # ls -l /mnt/etc/rc.d/rc.* If the executable bits are set on a script, it will be started, otherwise it will not. Obviously you should keep essential scripts, like the runlevel scripts executable. You can set the executable bit on a script with: # chmod +x /etc/rc.d/rc.scriptname And remove it with: # chmod -x /etc/rc.d/rc.scriptname Conﬁguring the dynamic linker run-time bindings GNU/Linux uses a cache for loading dynamic libraries, besides that many programs rely on generic version numbers of libraries (e.g. /usr/lib/libgtk-x11-2.0.so, rather than /usr/lib/libgtk-x11-2.0.so.0.600.8). The cache and library symlinks can be updates in one ldconﬁg run: # chroot /mnt /sbin/ldconfig You may not know the chroot command, it is a command that executes a command with a different root than the active root. In this example the root directory is changed to /mnt, and from there Linux runs /sbin/ldconﬁg. After the command has ﬁnished the system will return to the shell, which uses the original root. To use chroot this ldconﬁg command has to be executed once ﬁrst, because without initializing the dynamic linker run-time bindings most commands will not execute, since the system can not resolve the library dependencies. Setting the root password Now that the dynamic library cache and links are set up, you can execute commands on the installed system. We will make use of that during this step to set the root password. The password can be used to set the password for an existing user (the root user is part of the initial /etc/passwd ﬁle). We will use the chroot again to execute the command on the target partition: # chroot /mnt /usr/bin/passwd root 35 Chapter 6. Custom installation Setting the timezone On UNIX-like systems setting the timezone is important. For instance, the timezone is used by NTP to synchronize the system time correctly, or by different networking programs to compute the time difference between a client and a server. On GNU/Linux the timezone can be set by linking /etc/localtime to a timezone ﬁle. You can ﬁnd the timezone for your region by browsing the /mnt/usr/share/zoneinfo directory. For example to use Europe/Amsterdam as the timezone, you can execute the following commands: # cd /mnt # rm -rf etc/localtime # ln -sf /usr/share/zoneinfo/Europe/Amsterdam etc/localtime After setting the time zone, the system still does not know whether the hardware clock is set to the local time, or to the Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). If you use another operating system on the same machine that does not use use UTC it is best to set the hardware clock to the local time. On UNIX(-like) systems it is the custom to set the system time to UTC. You can set what time the system clock uses, by creating the ﬁle /etc/hardwareclock, and put the word localtime in it if your clock is set to the local time, or UTC when it is set to UTC. For example, to use UTC, you could create the ﬁle in the following manner: # cat > /mnt/etc/hardwareclock << EOF UTC EOF Creating the X11 font cache If you are going to use X11, you will have to initialize the font cache for TrueType and Type1 fonts. This can be done with the fc-cache command: # chroot /mnt /usr/X11R6/bin/fc-cache Automated installation script It is easy to combine the steps of a custom installation into one script, which performs the steps automatically. This is ideal for making default server installs or doing mass roll-outs of Linux clients. This sections contains a sample script that was written by William Park. It is easy to add an installation script to the Slackware Linux media, especially if you use an installation CD-ROM or boot the installation from an USB memory stick. The installation system is stored in one compressed image ﬁle, that is available on distribution media as isolinux/initrd.img. You can make a copy of this image to your hard disk, and decompress it with gunzip: # mv initrd.img initrd.img.gz # gunzip initrd.img.gz 36 Chapter 6. Custom installation After decompressing the image, you can mount the the ﬁle as a disk, using the loopback device: # mount -o loop initrd.img /mnt/hd You can now add a script to the initrd ﬁle by adding it to the directory structure that is available under the mount point. After making the necessary changes, you can unmount the ﬁlesystem and compress it: # umount /mnt/hd # gzip initd.img # mv initrd.img.gz initrd.img You can now put the new initrd.img on the installation medium, and test the script. #! /bin/sh # Copyright (c) 2003-2005 by William Park <opengeometry@yahoo.ca>. # All rights reserved. # # Usage: slackware-install.sh rm_ln () # Usage: rm_ln from to { rm -rf$2; ln -sf $1$2 }

############################################################################### echo "Partitioning harddisk..." ( echo -ne "n\np\n1\n\n+1000M\n" # /dev/hda1 --> 1GB swap echo -ne "n\np\n2\n\n+6000M\n" # /dev/hda2 --> 6GB / echo -ne "t\n1\n82\nw\n" ) | fdisk /dev/hda mkswap /dev/hda1 swapon /dev/hda1 # swap

mke2fs -c /dev/hda2 # / mount /dev/hda2 /mnt

############################################################################### echo "Installing packages..." mount -t iso9660 /dev/hdc /cdrom # actually, /var/log/mount cd /cdrom/slackware for p in [a-z]*; do # a, ap, ..., y installpkg -root /mnt -priority ADD $p/*.tgz done cd /mnt ############################################################################### echo "Configuring /dev/* stuffs..." 37 Chapter 6. Custom installation rm_ln rm_ln rm_ln rm_ln psaux dev/mouse ttyS0 dev/modem hdc dev/cdrom hdc dev/dvd # or, ’input/mice’ for usb mouse ############################################################################### echo "Configuring /etc/* stuffs..." cat > etc/fstab << EOF /dev/hda1 swap /dev/hda2 / devpts /dev/pts proc /proc # /dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom /dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy tmpfs /dev/shm EOF swap ext2 devpts proc iso9660 auto tmpfs defaults defaults gid=5,mode=620 defaults noauto,owner,ro noauto,owner noauto 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 cat > etc/networks << EOF loopback 127.0.0.0 localnet 192.168.1.0 EOF cat > etc/hosts << EOF 127.0.0.1 localhost 192.168.1.1 node1.example.net node1 EOF cat > etc/resolv.conf << EOF search example.net nameserver 127.0.0.1 EOF cat > etc/HOSTNAME << EOF node1.example.net EOF ## setup.05.fontconfig chroot . /sbin/ldconfig # must be run before other program chroot . /usr/X11R6/bin/fc-cache chroot . /usr/bin/passwd root ## setup.06.scrollkeeper chroot . /usr/bin/scrollkeeper-update ## setup.timeconfig rm_ln /usr/share/zoneinfo/Canada/Eastern cat > etc/hardwareclock << EOF localtime EOF ## setup.liloconfig cat > etc/lilo.conf << EOF boot=/dev/hda delay=100 vga=normal # 80x25 char # VESA framebuffer console: etc/localtime 38 Chapter 6. Custom installation # pixel char 8bit 15bit 16bit 24bit # ----- ---- ---- ----- ----- ----# 1600x1200 796 797 798 799 # 1280x1024 160x64 775 793 794 795 # 1024x768 128x48 773 790 791 792 # 800x600 100x37 771 787 788 789 # 640x480 80x30 769 784 785 786 image=/boot/vmlinuz # Linux root=/dev/hda2 label=bare.i read-only # other=/dev/hda1 # Windows # label=win # table=/dev/hda EOF lilo -r . ## setup.xwmconfig rm_ln xinitrc.fvwm95 etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc ############################################################################### echo "Configuring /etc/rc.d/rc.* stuffs..." cat > etc/rc.d/rc.keymap << EOF #! /bin/sh [ -x /usr/bin/loadkeys ] && /usr/bin/loadkeys us.map EOF chmod -x etc/rc.d/rc.keymap ## setup.mouse cat > etc/rc.d/rc.gpm << ’EOF’ #! /bin/sh case$1 in stop) echo "Stopping gpm..." /usr/sbin/gpm -k ;; restart) echo "Restarting gpm..." /usr/sbin/gpm -k sleep 1 /usr/sbin/gpm -m /dev/mouse -t ps2 ;; start) echo "Starting gpm..." /usr/sbin/gpm -m /dev/mouse -t ps2 ;; *) echo "Usage $0 {start|stop|restart}" ;; esac EOF chmod +x etc/rc.d/rc.gpm ## setup.netconfig cat > etc/rc.d/rc.inet1.conf << EOF 39 Chapter 6. Custom installation IPADDR=(192.168.1.1) # array variables NETMASK=(255.255.255.0) USE_DHCP=() # "yes" or "" DHCP_HOSTNAME=() GATEWAY="" DEBUG_ETH_UP="no" EOF cat > etc/rc.d/rc.netdevice << EOF /sbin/modprobe 3c59x EOF chmod +x etc/rc.d/rc.netdevice ## setup.setconsolefont mv etc/rc.d/rc.font{.sample,} chmod -x etc/rc.d/rc.font ## setup.services chmod +x etc/rc.d/rc.bind chmod +x etc/rc.d/rc.hotplug chmod +x etc/rc.d/rc.inetd chmod +x etc/rc.d/rc.portmap chmod +x etc/rc.d/rc.sendmail # chmod -x etc/rc.d/rc.atalk chmod -x etc/rc.d/rc.cups chmod -x etc/rc.d/rc.httpd chmod -x etc/rc.d/rc.ip_forward chmod -x etc/rc.d/rc.lprng chmod -x etc/rc.d/rc.mysqld chmod -x etc/rc.d/rc.pcmcia chmod -x etc/rc.d/rc.samba chmod -x etc/rc.d/rc.sshd 40 II. GNU/Linux Basics Chapter 7. The Bash shell Introduction The shell is the traditional interface used by UNIX and GNU/Linux. In contrast to the X Window System it is an interface that works with commands. In the beginning this can be a bit awkward, but the shell is very powerful. Even in these days the shell is almost unavoidable ;). The default shell on Slackware Linux is Bash. Bash means “Bourne-Again SHell”, which is a pun on the name of one of the traditional UNIX shells, the “Bourne Shell”. Slackware Linux also provides some other shells, but Bash is the main topic of this chapter. Starting the shell The procedure for starting the shell depends on whether you use a graphical or text-mode login. If you are logging on in text-mode the shell is immediately started after entering the (correct) password. If you are using a graphical login manager like gdm, log on as you would normally, and look in your window manager or desktop environment menu for an entry named “XTerm”. XTerm is a terminal emulator, after the terminal emulator is started the shell comes up. The shell might remind some people of MS-DOS. Be happy, it has nothing to do with DOS, the only similarity is that you can enter commands ;). Shell basics This chapter might be a difﬁcult to read for the ﬁrst time, because you might not know any shell commands. Many important commands are described in the next chapters, but those chapters are not really useful without any knowledge of the shell. So, it is not a bad idea to browse quickly through this chapter, and the next few chapters, to get an idea what this shell thing is all about. After that quick overview you should be able to understand this chapter. Executing commands The most important job for the shell is to execute your commands. Let’s look at a simple example. Most UNIX variants have a command named whoami, which shows as which user you are logged in. Try typing whoami, and press the <Enter> after that. The <Enter> tells the shell that it should execute the command that you have typed on the current line. The output looks like this: daniel@tazzy:~$ whoami daniel daniel@tazzy:~$As you can see the control is handed back to the shell after the command is ﬁnished. 42 Chapter 7. The Bash shell Browsing through shell commands It often happens that you have to execute commands that you executed earlier. Fortunately, you do not have to type them all over again. You can browse through the history of executed commands with the up and down arrows. Besides that it is also possible to search for a command. Press <Control> + <r> and start typing the command you want to execute. You will notice that bash will display the ﬁrst match it can ﬁnd. If this is not the match you were looking for you can continue typing the command (till it is unique and a match appears), or press <Control> + <r> once more to get the next match. When you have found the command you were looking for, you can execute it by pressing <Enter>. Completion Completion is one of the most useful functionalities of UNIX-like shells. Suppose that you have a directory with two ﬁles named websites and recipe. And suppose you want to cat the ﬁle websites (cat shows the contents of a ﬁle), by specifying websites as a parameter to cat. Normally you would type “cat websites”, and execute the command. Try typing “cat w”, and hit the <Tab> key. Bash will automatically expand what you typed to “cat websites”. But what happens if you have ﬁles that start with the same letter? Suppose that you have the recipe1.txt and recipe2.txt ﬁles. Type “cat r” and hit <Tab>, Bash will complete the ﬁlename as far as it can. It would leave you with “cat recipe”. Try hitting <Tab> again, and Bash will show you a list of ﬁlenames that start with “recipe”, in this case both recipe ﬁles. At this point you have to help Bash by typing the next character of the ﬁle you need. Suppose you want to cat recipe2, you can push the <2> key. After that there are no problems completing the ﬁlename, and hitting <Tab> completes the command to “cat recipe2.txt”. It is worth noting that completion also works with commands. Most GNU/Linux commands are quite short, so it will not be of much use most of the time. It is a good idea to practice a bit with completion, it can save alot of keystrokes if you can handle completion well. You can make some empty ﬁles to practive with using the touch command. For example, to make a ﬁle named recipe3.txt, execute touch recipe3.txt. Wildcards Most shells, including Bash, support wildcards. Wildcards are special characters that can be used to do pattern matching. The table listed below displays some commonly used wildcards. We are going to look at several examples to give a general idea how wildcards work. Table 7-1. Bash wildcards Wildcard * ? [] Matches A string of characters A single character A character in an array of characters Matching a string of characters As you can see in the table above the “*” character matches a string of characters. For example, *.html matches everything ending with .html, d*.html matches everything starting with a d and ending with .html. 43 Chapter 7. The Bash shell Suppose that you would like to list all ﬁles in the current directory with the .html extension, the following command will do the job:$ ls *.html book.html filesystem.html gfdl.html help.html

installation.html internet.html introduction.html slackware-basics.html

pkgmgmt.html printer.html proc.html shell.html

usermgmt.html xfree86.html

Likewise we could remove all ﬁles starting with an in:
$rm in* Matching single characters The “?” wildcard works as the “*” wildcard, but matches single characters. Suppose that we have three ﬁles, file1.txt, file2.txt and file3.txt. The string ﬁle?.txt matches all three of these ﬁles, but it does not match file10.txt (“10” are two characters). Matching characters from a set The “[]” wildcard matches every character between the brackets. Suppose we have the ﬁles from the previous example, file1.txt, file2.txt and file3.txt. The string ﬁle[23].txt matches file2.txt and file3.txt, but not file1.txt. Redirections and pipes One of the main features of UNIX-like shells are redirections and pipes. Before we start to look at both techniques we have to look how most UNIX-like commands work. When a command is not getting data from a ﬁle, it will open a special pseudo-ﬁle named stdin, and wait for data to appear on it. The same principle can be applied for command output, when there is no explicit reason for saving output to a ﬁle, the pseudo-ﬁle stdout will be opened for output of data. This principle is shown schematically in Figure 7-1 Figure 7-1. Standard input and output You can see stdin and stdout in action with the cat command. If cat is started without any parameters it will just wait for input on stdin and output the same data on stdout. If no redirection is used keyboard input will be used for stdin, and stdout output will be printed to the terminal:$ cat Hello world! Hello world!

As you can see cat will print data to stdout after inputting data to stdin using the keyboard.

44

Chapter 7. The Bash shell

Redirection
The shell allows you to take use of stdin and stdout using the “<” and “>”. Data is redirected in which way the sharp bracket points. In the following example we will redirect the md5 summaries calculated for a set of ﬁles to a ﬁle named md5sums:
$md5sum * > md5sums$ cat md5sums 6be249ef5cacb10014740f61793734a8 220d2cc4d5d5fed2aa52f0f48da38ebe 631172a1cfca3c7cf9e8d0a16e6e8cfe

test1 test2 test3

As we can see in the cat output the output of the md5sum * output was redirected to the md5sums ﬁle. We can also use redirection to provide input to a command:
$md5sum < test1 6be249ef5cacb10014740f61793734a8 - This feeds the contents of the test1 to md5sum. pipes You can also connect the input and output of commands using so-called pipes. A pipe between commands can be made with the “|” character. Two or more combined commands are called a pipeline. Figure 7-2 shows a schematic overview of a pipeline consisting of two commands. Figure 7-2. A pipeline The “syntax” of a pipe is: command1 | command2 ... | commandn. If you know how the most basic UNIX-like commands work you can now let these commands work together. Let’s look at a quick example:$ cat /usr/share/dict/american-english | grep "aba" | wc -l 123

The ﬁrst command, cat, reads the dictionary ﬁle /usr/share/dict/american-english. The output of the cat command is piped to grep, which prints out all ﬁles containing the phrase “aba”. In turn, the output of “grep” is piped to wc -l, which counts the number of lines it receives from stdin. Finally, when the stream is ﬁnished wc prints the number of lines it counted. So, combined three commands to count the number of words containing the phrase “aba” in this particular dictionary. There are hundreds of small utilities that handle speciﬁc tasks. As you can imagine, together these commands provide a very powerful toolbox by making combinations using pipes.

45

Chapter 8. Files and directories
Introduction
UNIX-like operating systems use a hierarchical ﬁlesystem to store ﬁles and directories. Directories can contain ﬁles and other directories, the top directory (/) is named the root directory (not to be confused with the /root directory). Most ﬁlesystems also support ﬁle links (which provide alternative names for a ﬁle) and soft links. Other ﬁlesystems can be “connected” to an arbitrary directory. This process is named “mounting”, and the directory in which the ﬁlesystem is mounted is named the “mount point”. This chapter covers the basic navigation of the ﬁlesystem, commands which are used to remove and create directories, ﬁlesystem permissions, links and mounting.

The basics
pwd
pwd(1) is a simple utility which shows the directory you are currently working in. The pwd does not require any parameters. This is an example output of pwd:
$pwd /home/danieldk ls ls is similar to the dir command in DOS and Windows. ls can be used to display ﬁles and directories located in speciﬁc directories. Running the ls command without any parameters shows the contents of the current directory:$ ls COPYING

CVS

Makefile

html

images

pdf

src

tex

Naturally it is also possible to show the contents of other directories. You can do this by specifying the path as a parameter tot the ls command:
$ls / bin cdrom boot cdrom1 dev etc floppy home initrd lib lost+found mnt opt proc root sbin sys tmp usr var windows A disadvantage of the default output is that it provides little information about ﬁles and directories. For example, it is not possible to see whether some entry is a ﬁle or directory, what size a ﬁle is, or who the owner of the ﬁle is. The ls has the -l parameter to show more information:$ ls -l total 52 -rw-r--r-drwxr-xr-x -rw-r--r--

1 daniel 2 daniel 1 daniel

daniel daniel daniel

20398 Jul 16 14:28 COPYING 4096 Jul 16 14:28 CVS 768 Jul 16 14:28 Makefile

46

Chapter 8. Files and directories
-rw-r--r-drwxr-xr-x drwxr-xr-x drwxr-xr-x drwxr-xr-x drwxr-xr-x 1 3 3 3 3 3 daniel daniel daniel daniel daniel daniel daniel daniel daniel daniel daniel daniel 408 4096 4096 4096 4096 4096 Jul Jul Jul Jul Jul Jul 16 16 16 16 20 16 14:28 14:28 14:28 14:28 00:11 14:28 README html images pdf src tex

cd
Another important command is the cd command. It can be used to change the current working directory:
$cd /home/danieldk/ With the pwd command you can see it worked:$ pwd /home/danieldk

mkdir
As you might have guessed, the mkdir(1) command can be used to create directories. For example:
$pwd /home/danieldk$ mkdir test $cd test$ pwd /home/danieldk/test

It might happen that you want to create a directory in a parent directory which does not exist yet. For example, if you want to create the test2/hello/ directory, but the test2 directory does not yet exist. In this case you can make both directories with only one mkdir command:
$mkdir -p test2/hello cp Files can be copied with the cp(1) command, the basic syntax is cp source destination. For example, suppose that we have a ﬁle named memo which we would like to copy to the writings directory. You can do this with the following command:$ cp memo writings/

It is also possible to copy a ﬁle in the same directory. For example, if we would like to make a new memo based on memo, named memo2, we could execute the following command:
$cp memo memo2 47 Chapter 8. Files and directories It is also possible to copy directories recursively, this can be done by adding the -r parameter. The following command copies the memos directory, and all subdirectories, and (sub)ﬁles to the writings directory:$ cp -r memos writings/

mv
The mv(1) command is comparable to cp, but it is used to move ﬁles. Suppose that we have the same situation as in the ﬁrst cp example, but you would rather like to move memo to the writings directory. The following command would do that:
$mv memo writings/ It is also possible to move directories. But, mv always works recursively. For example, the following command will move the memos directory to the writings directory:$ mv memos writings/

rm
The rm(1) command is used to remove ﬁles and directories. Let’s look at a simple example:
$rm hello.c This commands removes the ﬁle hello.c. Sometimes the rm asks for a conﬁrmation. You can ignore this with the -f parameter:$ rm -f *

This command removes all ﬁles in the current directory without asking for conﬁrmation. It is also possible to delete directories or even whole directory trees. rm provides the -r parameter to do this. Suppose that we want to delete the ogle directory and all subdirectories and ﬁles in that directory, this can be done in the following way:
$rm -r -f ogle/ Many commands allow you to combine parameters. The following example is equivalent to the last one:$ rm -rf ogle/

Permissions
A short introduction
Every ﬁle in GNU/Linux has permissions. As you might have noticed, ﬁle permissions can be shown with the ls -l command:

48

Chapter 8. Files and directories
$ls -l logo.jpg -rw-r--r-1 danieldk users 9253 Dec 23 19:12 logo.jpg The permissions are shown in the ﬁrst column. Permissions that can be set are read(r), write(w) and execute(x). These permissions can we set for three classes: owner(u), group(g) and others(o). The permissions are visible in the second to ninth character in the ﬁrst column. These nine characters are divided in three groups. The ﬁrst three characters represent the permissions for the owner, the next three characters represent the permissions for the group, ﬁnally the last three characters represent the permissions for other users. Thus, the example ﬁle shown above can be written to by the owner and can be read by all three classes of users (owner, group and others). Each GNU/Linux system has many distinct users (a list of users can be found in /etc/passwd), and a user can be a member of certain groups. This kind of user management provides makes it possible to manage detailed permissions for each ﬁle. In the example shown above danieldk is the owner of the ﬁle and group permissions apply to the group users. In this example groups rights do not differ from the rights of other users. chown The chown(1) command is used to set the ﬁle owner and to which group group permissions should apply to. Suppose we want to make danieldk the owner of the ﬁle logo2.jpg, this can be done with the chown: # chown danieldk logo2.jpg Using the ls we can see that the owner is now danieldk: # ls -l logo2.jpg -rw-r--r-1 root root # chown danieldk logo2.jpg # ls -l logo2.jpg -rw-r--r-1 danieldk root 9253 Dec 29 11:35 logo2.jpg 9253 Dec 29 11:35 logo2.jpg But group permissions still apply for the root group. This group can be changed by adding a colon after the owner, followed by the name of the group (in this example the group is nedslackers): # chown danieldk:nedslackers logo2.jpg # ls -l logo2.jpg -rw-r--r-1 danieldk nedslackers 9253 Dec 29 11:35 logo2.jpg It is also possible to change ownership recursively, this can be done with the recursive (-R) parameter: # chown -R danieldk:users oggs/ chmod File permissions can be manipulated using the chmod(1) command. The most basic syntax of chmod is chmod [u,g,o][+/-][r,w,x] ﬁlename. The ﬁrst parameter consists of the following elements: 1. which classes this manipulation permission applies to, 2. if the permissions should be added (+) or removed (-), and 3. which permissions should be manipulated. Suppose we want to make the ﬁle memo writable for the owner of the ﬁle and the groups for which the group permissions apply. This can be done with the following command: 49 Chapter 8. Files and directories$ chmod ug+w memo

As you can see below the memo is now writable for the ﬁle owner and group:
$ls -l memo -r--r--r-1 daniel users bash-2.05b$ chmod ug+w memo bash-2.05b$ls -l notes -rw-rw-r-1 daniel users 12 Mar 9 16:28 memo 12 Mar 9 16:28 memo Just like the chown command it is also possible to do recursive (-R) operations. In the following example the secret/, including subdirectories and ﬁles in this directory, is made unreadable for the group set for this directory and other users:$ chmod -R go-r secret/

Archives
Introduction
Sooner or later a GNU/Linux user will encounter tar archives, tar is the standard format for archiving ﬁles on GNU/Linux. It is often used in conjunction with gzip or bzip2. Both commands can compress ﬁles and archives. Table 8-1 lists frequently used archive extensions, and what they mean. Table 8-1. Archive ﬁle extensions Extension .tar .tar.gz .tgz .tar.bz2 .tbz Meaning An uncompressed tar archive A tar archive compressed with gzip A tar archive compressed with gzip A tar archive compressed with bzip2 A tar archive compressed with bzip2

The difference between bzip2 and gzip is that bzip2 can ﬁnd repeating information in larger blocks, resulting in better compression. But bzip2 is also a lot slower, because it does more data analysis.

Extracting archives
Since many software and data in the GNU/Linux world is archived with tar it is important to get used to extracting tar archives. The ﬁrst thing you will often want to do when you receive a tar archive is to list its contents. This can be achieved by using the t parameter. However, if we just execute tar with this parameter and the name of the archive it will just sit and wait until you enter something to the standard input:
$tar t test.tar This happens because tar reads data from its standard input. If you forgot how redirection works, it 50 Chapter 8. Files and directories is a good idea to reread the section called Redirections and pipes in Chapter 7. Let’s see what happens if we redirect our tar archive to tar:$ tar t < test.tar test/ test/test2 test/test1

That looks more like the output you probably expected. This archive seems to contain a directory test, which contains the ﬁles test2 and test2. It is also possible to specify the archive ﬁle name as an parameter to tar, by using the f parameter:
$tar tf test.tar test/ test/test2 test/test1 This looks like an archive that contains useful ﬁles ;). We can now go ahead, and extract this archive by using the x parameter:$ tar xf test.tar

We can now verify that tar really extracted the archive by listing the contents of the directory with ls:
$ls test/ test1 test2 Extracting or listing ﬁles from a gzipped or bzipped archive is not much more difﬁcult. This can be done by adding a z or b for respectively archives compressed with gzip or bzip2. For example, we can list the contents of a gzipped archive with:$ tar ztf archive2.tar.gz

And a bzipped archive can be extracted with:
$tar bxf archive3.tar.bz2 Creating archives You can create archives with the c parameter. Suppose that we have the directory test shown in the previous example. We can make an archive with the test directory and the ﬁles in this directory with:$ tar cf important-files.tar test

This will create the important-files.tar archive (which is speciﬁed with the f parameter). We can now verify the archive:
$tar tf important-files.tar test/ test/test2 test/test1 51 Chapter 8. Files and directories Creating a gzipped or bzipped archive goes along the same lines as extracting compressed archives: add a z for gzipping an archive, or b for bzipping an archive. Suppose that we wanted to create a gzip compressed version of the archive created above. We can do this with: tar zcf important-files.tar.gz test Extended attributes Introduction Extended attributes (EAs) are relatively new on GNU/Linux. Extended attributes are a special kind of values that are associated with a ﬁle or directory. EAs provide the means to add extra attributes besides the common attributes (modiﬁcation time, traditional ﬁle permissions, etc.). For example, one could add the attribute “Photographer” to a collection of JPEG ﬁles. Extended attributes are not physically stored in the ﬁle, but as meta-data in the ﬁlesystem. Extended attributes are only supported by 2.6.x and newer 2.4.x kernels. Besides that they are not supported on all ﬁlesystems, the commonly used Ext2, Ext3 and XFS ﬁlesystems do support extended attributes. Installing the necessary utilities The extended attribute software is available in Slackware Linux through the xfsprogs package, which can be found in the “a” disk set. Don’t be misled by the name of the package, the extended attribute tools also work with other ﬁlesystems, like Ext3. Showing extended attributes Extended attributes can be queried using the getfattr command. Just using getfattr with a ﬁle as a parameter will show the attributes that are known for that particular ﬁle, without the values set for the attributes. For example:$ getfattr note.txt # file: note.txt user.Author

This ﬁle has one extended attribute, “user.Author”. An attribute has the following form: “namespace.attribute”. There are four deﬁned namespaces: “security”, “system”, “trusted”, and “user”. The role of these namespaces are described in the attr(5) manual page. The “user” namespace is of particular interest to us, because this namespace is used to assign arbitrary attributes to ﬁles. The values associated with an attribute can be shown using the -d (dump) parameter. For example:
$getfattr -d note.txt # file: note.txt user.Author="Daniel" In this example the attribute “user.Author” has the value “Daniel” for the ﬁle note.txt. 52 Chapter 8. Files and directories Setting extended attributes Attributes are set with the setfattr command. An attribute can be added to a ﬁle using the -n (name) parameter, be sure to specify the namespace and the attribute name, for example:$ setfattr -n user.Author note2.txt

The value of the attribute can be set using the -v (value) parameter:
$setfattr -n user.Author -v Mike note2.txt But it is also possible to add an attribute and setting its value in one run, by specifying both the -n and -v parameters. For example, the following command adds the MD5 sum of the ﬁle as an extended attribute:$ setfattr -n user.MD5 -v ‘md5sum note2.txt‘ note2.txt $getfattr -d note2.txt # file: note2.txt user.Author="Mike" user.MD5="78be7a3148027ae7a897aad95e7d9c58" Mounting ﬁlesystems Introduction Like most Unices Linux uses a technique named “mounting” to access ﬁlesystems. Mounting means that a ﬁlesystem is connected to a directory in the root ﬁlesystem. One could for example mount a CD-ROM drive to the /mnt/cdrom directory. Linux supports many kinds of ﬁlesystems, like Ext2, Ext3, ReiserFS, JFS, XFS, ISO9660 (used for CD-ROMs), UDF (used on some DVDs) and DOS/Windows ﬁlesystems, like FAT, FAT32 and NTFS. These ﬁlesystems can reside on many kinds of media, for example hard drives, CD-ROMs and Flash drives. This section explains how ﬁlesystems can be mounted and unmounted. mount The mount(8) is used to mount ﬁlesystems. The basic syntax is: “mount /dev/devname /mountpoint”. The device name can be any block device, like hard disks or CD-ROM drives. The mount point can be an arbitrary point in the root ﬁlesystem. Let’s look at an example: # mount /dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom This mounts the /dev/cdrom on the /mnt/cdrom mountpoint. The /dev/cdrom device name is normally a link to the real CD-ROM device name (for example, /dev/hdc). As you can see, the concept is actually very simple, it just takes some time to learn the device names ;). Sometimes it is necessary to specify which kind of ﬁlesystem you are trying to mount. The ﬁlesystem type can be speciﬁed by adding the -t parameter: # mount -t vfat /dev/sda1 /mnt/flash This mounts the vfat ﬁlesystem on /dev/sda1 to /mnt/flash. 53 Chapter 8. Files and directories umount The umount(1) command is used to unmount ﬁlesystems. umount accepts two kinds of parameters, mount points or devices. For example: # umount /mnt/cdrom # umount /dev/sda1 The ﬁrst command unmounts the ﬁlesystem that was mounted on /mnt/cdrom, the second commands unmounts the ﬁlesystem on /dev/sda1. The fstab ﬁle The GNU/Linux system has a special ﬁle, /etc/fstab, that speciﬁes which ﬁlesystems should be mounted during the system boot. Let’s look at an example: /dev/hda10 /dev/hda5 /dev/hda6 /dev/hda7 /dev/hda8 /dev/hda9 /dev/cdrom /dev/fd0 devpts proc swap / /var /tmp /home /usr /mnt/cdrom /mnt/floppy /dev/pts /proc swap xfs xfs xfs xfs xfs iso9660 auto devpts proc defaults defaults defaults defaults defaults defaults noauto,owner,ro noauto,owner gid=5,mode=620 defaults 0 1 1 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 1 2 2 2 2 0 0 0 0 As you can see each entry in the fstab ﬁle has ﬁve entries: fs_spec, fs_ﬁle, fs_vfstype, fs_mntops, fs_freq, and fs_passno. We are now going to look at each entry. fs_spec The fs_spec option speciﬁes the block device, or remote ﬁlesystem that should be mounted. As you can see in the example several /dev/hda partitions are speciﬁed, as well as the CD-ROM drive and ﬂoppy drive. When NFS volumes are mounted an IP address and directory can be speciﬁed, for example: 192.168.1.10:/exports/data. fs_ﬁle fs_ﬁle speciﬁes the mount point. This can be an arbitrary directory in the ﬁlesystem. fs_vfstype This option speciﬁes what kind of ﬁlesystem the entry represents. For example this can be: ext2, ext3, reiserfs, xfs, nfs, vfat, or ntfs. fs_mntops The fs_mntops option speciﬁes which parameters should be used for mounting the ﬁlesystem. The mount(8) manual page has an extensive description of the available options. These are the most interesting options: 54 Chapter 8. Files and directories • noauto: ﬁlesystems that are listed in /etc/fstab are normally mounted automatically. When the “noauto” option is speciﬁed, the ﬁlesystem will not be mounted during the system boot, but only after issuing a mount command. When mounting such ﬁlesystem, only the mount point or device name has to be speciﬁed, for example: mount /mnt/cdrom user: adding the “user” option will allow normal users to mount the ﬁlesystem (normally only the superuser is allowed to mount ﬁlesystems). owner: the “owner” option will allow the owner of the speciﬁed device to mount the speciﬁed device. You can see the owner of a device using ls, e.g. ls -l /dev/cdrom. noexec: with this option enabled users can not run ﬁles from the mounted ﬁlesystem. This can be used to provide more security. nosuid: this option is comparable to the “noexec” option. With “nosuid” enabled SUID bits on ﬁles on the ﬁlesystem will not be allowed. SUID is used for certain binaries to provide a normal user to do something privileged. This is certainly a security threat, so this option should really be used for removable media, etc. A normal user mount will force the nosuid option, but a mount by the superuser will not! unhide: this option is only relevant for normal CD-ROMs with the ISO9660 ﬁlesystem. If “unhide” is speciﬁed hidden ﬁles will also be visible. • • • • • fs_freq If the “fs_freq” is set to 1 or higher, it speciﬁes after how many days a ﬁlesystem dump (backup) has to be made. This option is only used when dump(8) is set up correctly to handle this. fs_passno This ﬁeld us used by fsck(8) to determine the order in which ﬁlesystems are checked during the system boot. Encrypting and signing ﬁles Introduction There are two security mechanisms for securing ﬁles: signing ﬁles and encrypting ﬁles. Signing a ﬁle means that a special digital signature is generated for a ﬁle. You, or other persons can use the signature to verify the integrity of the ﬁle. File encryption encodes a ﬁle in a way that only a person for which the ﬁle was intended to read can read the ﬁle. This system relies on two keys: the private and the public key. Public keys are used to encrypt ﬁles, and ﬁles can only be decrypted with the private key. This means that one can sent his public key out to other persons. Others can use this key to send encrypted ﬁles, that only the person with the private key can decode. Of course, this means that the security of this system depends on how well the private is kept secret. Slackware Linux provides an excellent tool for signing and encrypting ﬁles, named GnuPG. GnuPG can be installed from the “n” disk set. 55 Chapter 8. Files and directories Generating your private and public keys Generating public and private keys is a bit complicated, because GnuPG uses DSA keys by default. DSA is an encryption algorithm, the problem is that the maximum key length of DSA is 1024 bits, this is considered too short for the longer term. That is why it is a good idea to use 2048 bit RSA keys. This section describers how this can be done. Note: 1024-bit keys were believed to be secure for a long time. But Bernstein’s paper Circuits for Integer Factorization: a Proposal contests this, the bottom line is that it is quite feasible for national security agencies to produce hardware that can break keys in a relatively short amount of time. Besides that it has be shown that 512-bit RSA keys can be broken in a relatively short time using common hardware. More information about these issues can by found in this e-mail to the cypherpunks list: http://lists.saigon.com/vault/security/encryption/rsa1024.html We can generate a key by executing:$ gpg --gen-key

The ﬁrst question is what kind of key you would like to make. We will choose (4) RSA (sign only):
Please select what kind of key you want: (1) DSA and ElGamal (default) (2) DSA (sign only) (4) RSA (sign only) Your selection? 4

You will then be asked what the size of the key you want to generate has to be. Type in 2048 to generate a 2048 bit key, and press enter to continue.
What keysize do you want? (1024) 2048

The next question is simple to answer, just choose what you like. Generally speaking it is not a bad idea to let the key be valid inﬁnitely. You can always deactivate the key with a special revocation certiﬁcate.
Please specify how long the key should be valid. 0 = key does not expire <n> = key expires in n days <n>w = key expires in n weeks <n>m = key expires in n months <n>y = key expires in n years Key is valid for? (0) 0

GnuPG will then ask for conﬁrmation. After conﬁrming your name and e-mail address will be requested. GnuPG will also ask for a comment, you can leave this blank, or you could ﬁll in something like “Work” or “Private”, to indicate what the key is used for. For example:
Real name: John Doe Email address: john@doe.com Comment: Work You selected this USER-ID: "John Doe (Work) <john@doe.com>"

GnuPG will the ask you to conﬁrm your user ID. After conﬁrming it GnuPG will ask you to enter a password. Be sure to use a good password:

56

Chapter 8. Files and directories
You need a Passphrase to protect your secret key. Enter passphrase:

After entering the password twice GnuPG will generate the keys. But we are not done yet. GnuPG has only generated a key for signing information, not for encryption of information. To continue, have a look at the output, and look for the key ID. In the information about the key you will see pub 2048R/ . The key ID is printed after this fragment. In this example:
public and secret key created and signed. key marked as ultimately trusted. pub 2048R/8D080768 2004-07-16 John Doe (Work) <john@doe.com> Key fingerprint = 625A 269A 16B9 C652 B953 8B64 389A E0C9 8D08 0768

the key ID is 8D080768. If you lost the output of the key generation you can still ﬁnd the key ID in the output of the gpg --list-keys command. Use the key ID to tell GnuPG that you want to edit your key:
$gpg --edit-key <Key ID> With the example key above the command would be:$ gpg --edit-key 8D080768

GnuPG will now display a command prompt. Execute the addkey command on this command prompt:

Key is protected. You need a passphrase to unlock the secret key for user: "John Doe (Work) <john@doe.com>" 2048-bit RSA key, ID 8D080768, created 2004-07-16 Enter passphrase:

After entering the password GnuPG will ask you what kind of key you would like to create. Choose RSA (encrypt only), and ﬁll in the information like you did earlier (be sure to use a 2048 bit key). For example:
Please select what kind of key you want: (2) DSA (sign only) (3) ElGamal (encrypt only) (4) RSA (sign only) (5) RSA (encrypt only) Your selection? 5 What keysize do you want? (1024) 2048 Requested keysize is 2048 bits Please specify how long the key should be valid. 0 = key does not expire <n> = key expires in n days <n>w = key expires in n weeks <n>m = key expires in n months

57

Chapter 8. Files and directories
<n>y = key expires in n years Key is valid for? (0) 0

And conﬁrm that the information is correct. After the key is generated you can leave the GnuPG command prompt, and save the new key with the save command:
Command> save

Congratulations! You have now generated the necessary keys to encrypt and decrypt e-mails and ﬁles. You can now conﬁgure your e-mail client to use GnuPG. It is a good idea to store the contents of the .gnupg directory on some reliable medium, and store that in a safe place! If your private key is lost you can’t decrypt ﬁles and messages that were encrypted with your public key. If the private key, and your password are stolen, the security of this system is completely compromised.

To make GnuPG useful, you have to give your public key to people who send you ﬁles or e-mails. They can use your public key to encrypt ﬁles, or use it to verify whether a ﬁle has a correct signature or not. The key can be exported using the --export parameter. It is also a good idea to specify the --output parameter, this will save the key in a ﬁle. The following command would save the public key of John Doe, used in earlier examples, to the ﬁle key.gpg:
$gpg --output key.gpg --export john@doe.com This saves the key in binary format. Often it is more convenient to use the so-called “ASCII armored output”, which ﬁts better for adding the key to e-mails, or websites. You export an ASCII armored version of the key by adding the --armor parameter:$ gpg --armor --output key.gpg --export john@doe.com

If you look at the key.gpg ﬁle you will notice that the ASCII armored key is a much more comfortable format.

Signatures
With GPG you can make a signature for a ﬁle. This signature is unique, because your signature can only be made with your private key. This means that other people can check whether the ﬁle was really sent by you, and whether it was in any way altered or not. Files can be signed with the --detach-sign parameter. Let us look at an example. This command will make a signature for the memo.txt ﬁle. The signature will be stored in memo.txt.sig.
$gpg --output memo.txt.sig --detach-sign memo.txt You need a passphrase to unlock the secret key for user: "John Doe (Work) <john@doe.com>" 2048-bit RSA key, ID 8D080768, created 2004-07-16 Enter passphrase: As you can see, GnuPG will ask you to enter the password for your private key. After you have entered the right key the signature ﬁle (memo.txt.sig) will be created. 58 Chapter 8. Files and directories You can verify a ﬁle with its signature using the --verify parameter. Specify the signature ﬁle as a parameter to the --verify parameter. The ﬁle that needs to be veriﬁed can be speciﬁed as the ﬁnal parameter:$ gpg --verify memo.txt.sig memo.txt gpg: Signature made Tue Jul 20 23:47:45 2004 CEST using RSA key ID 8D080768 gpg: Good signature from "John Doe (Work) <john@doe.com>"

This will conﬁrm that the ﬁle was indeed signed by John Doe (Work) <john@doe.com>, with the key 8D080768, and that the ﬁle is unchanged. Suppose the ﬁle was changed, GnuPG would have complained about it loudly:
$gpg --verify memo.txt.sig memo.txt gpg: Signature made Tue Jul 20 23:47:45 2004 CEST using RSA key ID 8D080768 gpg: BAD signature from "John Doe (Work) <john@doe.com>" Encryption One of the main features of GnuPG is encryption. Due to its use of symmetric cryptography, the person who encrypts a ﬁle and the person who decrypts a ﬁle do not need to share a key. You can encrypt a ﬁle with the private key of another person, and she can decrypt it with her private key. You can encrypt ﬁles with the --encrypt. If you do not specify a user ID for which the ﬁle should be encrypted, GnuPG will prompt for the user ID. You can specify the user ID with the -r parameter. In the following example, the ﬁle secret.txt will be encrypted for another person named John Doe:$ gpg --encrypt -r "John Doe" secret.txt

The user ID is quoted with double quotes for making sure that the ID is interpreted as a single program argument. After the encryption is completed, the encrypted version of the ﬁle will be available as secret.txt.gpg. The user who receives the ﬁle can decrypt it with the --decrypt parameter of the gpg command:
$gpg --output secret.txt --decrypt secret.txt.gpg You need a passphrase to unlock the secret key for user: "John Doe (Work) <john@doe.com>" 2048-bit RSA key, ID 8D080768, created 2004-07-16 (main key ID EC3ED1AB) Enter passphrase: gpg: encrypted with 2048-bit RSA key, ID 8D080768, created 2004-07-16 "John Doe (Work) <john@doe.com>" In this example the --output parameter is used store the decrypted content in secret.txt. 59 Chapter 9. Text Utilities Introduction On of the central ideas of UNIX(-like) operating systems is that “everything is a ﬁle”. Even devices can be treated as a ﬁle. Basically there are three types of ﬁles in UNIX: • • • Binary ﬁles, for example executables, and libraries. Device ﬁles, for example /dev/zero, and /dev/hda. Text ﬁles, pretty much anything else. Due to the fact that text ﬁles have such an important role in UNIX-like operating systems, like GNU/Linux, this book has a separate chapter dedicated to the subject of processing text ﬁles. In the beginning its use may not be that obvious, but once you get used to these tools you will see that you will probably use some of these tools on a daily basis. Note: This chapter relies heavily on the use of pipes and redirection, so it it a good idea to read the section called Redirections and pipes in Chapter 7 if you have not done that yet. The basics cat The cat command is one of the simplest commands around. Its default behaviour is just to send anything it receives on the standard input to the standard input until the end of ﬁle character (^D) is sent to the standard input. You can see this by executing cat, and entering some text:$ cat Hello world! Hello world! Testing... 1 2 3 Testing... 1 2 3

You can also concatenate ﬁles with cat, by providing the ﬁles you would like to concatenate as an argument. The concatenated ﬁles will be sent to the standard output:
$cat test1 This is the$ cat test2 This is the $cat test1 This is the This is the content of test1. content of test2. test2 content of test1. content of test2. 60 Chapter 9. Text Utilities As you can see it is also possible to send a ﬁle to the standard output by specifying one ﬁle as cat’s argument. This is an alternative to redirection. For example, one could either of these command:$ less < test1 $cat test1 | less echo The echo is used to send something to the standard output by specifying it as an argument to echo. For example, one could use echo to send a simple message to the standard output:$ echo "Hello world!" Hello world!

wc
One of the common things people often want to do with a text is counting the number of words, or lines in a text. The wc command can be used for this purpose. The ﬁle to be counted can be speciﬁed as an argument to wc
$wc essay.txt 174 1083 8088 essay.txt As you can see the default output returns three numbers. These are (in order): the number of lines, the number of words, and the number of characters. It is also possibly to return only one of these numbers, with respectively -l, -w, and -m. For example, if we only want to know the number of lines in the ﬁle, we could do the following:$ wc -l essay.txt 174 essay.txt

In some situations you might want to use the output of wc in a pipeline, or as an argument to another command. The problem with specifying the ﬁle name as an argument is that wc will also show the name of the ﬁle (as you can see in the example above). You can work around this behavior by redirecting the ﬁle contents to wc. For example:
$wc -l < essay.txt 174 tr The tr is used to translate or delete characters. All uses of tr require one or two sets. A set is a string of characters. You can specify most characters in a set. The tr(1) manual page provides an overview of some character sequences with a special meaning. Table 9-1 describes some of the fequently used special character sequences. 61 Chapter 9. Text Utilities Table 9-1. Special tr character sequences Sequence \\ \n char1-char2 [:alnum:] [:alpha:] [:punct:] Meaning backslash (\) new line All characters from char1 to char2 (e.g. “a-z”) All alphanumeric characters All letters in the alphabet Punctuation characters Characters can be deleted from one text with the -d, and a set that speciﬁes the characters that should be deleted. Let’s start with an easy example: suppose that you want to remove all the new line characters from a text stored in text, and that you would like to redirect the output to a ﬁle named text-continuous. Obviously, we need a set with only one character, namely the new line character, which is speciﬁed with “\n”. This can be accomplished with the following command:$ cat text | tr -d "\n" > text-continuous

It happens quite often that you want to delete everything, but the characters that are speciﬁed in a set. You can do this by using the -c, which automatically complements the speciﬁed set. For example, if you would like to remove every character from a text, except for alphabetical characters, new lines, and spaces, you can use the -c, and the following set: “[:alpha:]\n ”. Combined in a command it would look like this:
$cat text | tr -c -d "[:alpha:]\n " Using tr for translating characters does not require any extra parameters, but two sets. In the two sets the ﬁrst character of the ﬁrst set is replaced with the ﬁrst character of the second set, etc. Suppose that we use these two sets: “abc” and “def”. With these sets the following translations occur: “a -> d”, “b -> e”, and “c -> f”. If the ﬁrst set is longer than the second set, then the second set is expanded by repeating the last character of the second set. If the second set is longer than the ﬁrst set, extra characters in the second set are ignored. Translations can be useful for many purposes. For example, it can be used to make a wordlist from a text. This can be done by replacing all spaces with a newline:$ cat essay.txt | tr " " "\n" | less

As you can imagine the output might still contain non-alphabetic characters. We can combine the command above with the delete functionality of tr to make a wordlist without unwanted characters:
$cat essay.txt | tr " " "\n" | tr -c -d "[:alpha:]\n" > wordlist sort The command is used to sort lines in a ﬁle. To sort a text alphabetically, you can just pipe or redirect the data to sort. sort also accepts ﬁle names as its parameters. When multiple ﬁles are speciﬁed, the ﬁles will be concatenated before sorting the lines. Suppose that you have a word list that is 62 Chapter 9. Text Utilities unordered, which is stored in the ﬁle wordlist_unsorted. You can sort the contents of the ﬁle, and output it to wordlist_sorted with:$ sort wordlist_unsorted > wordlist_sorted

The sort accepts many different parameters, which are all described in the sort(1) manual page. An often-used parameter we will shortly discuss is -u. With this parameter only unique words will be sent to stdout (in other words: double occurences will be ignored). By combining sort -u and the tr, discussed in the section called tr, you can make a sorted wordlist of a text:
$cat essay.txt | tr " " "\n" | tr -c -d "[:alpha:]\n" | sort -u > wordlist_sorted If the command listed in this example is combined with wc, one could count the size of the used vocabulary in the text. In the sorted word list each line represents an unique word from the original text. So, we can count the total number of words that were used, by counting the total number of lines in the sorted list:$ cat essay.txt | tr " " "\n" | tr -c -d "[:alpha:]\n" | sort -u | wc -l

uniq
The uniq can be compared to the -u parameter of the sort; it removes all but one entry of successive identical lines (in a sorted list). The main difference is that it provides some extra parameters that can be used to manipulate the output. The default behavior works like sort -u, and reduces duplicate entries:
$sort wordlist_unsorted | uniq > wordlist_sorted To make a list of how often a line occurs in a text, one could count how many identical lines the sorted list contains of every line. Uniq can add the number of identical lines with the -c parameter. To make a list of how many times each word occurs in a text, you can combine tr, sort, and uniq:$ cat essay.txt | tr " " "\n" | tr -c -d "[:alpha:]\n" | sort | uniq -c > wordlist_sorted

63

Chapter 10. Process management
Introduction
UNIX-like operating systems work with processes. A process is an unit the operating system schedules for CPU time and the memory manager manages memory for. Basically a process consists of program code (named text), data (used by a program) and a stack. The stack is used by the program to store variables. Programs are at least one process. A program/process can ask the system to create a new copy of itself, which is called a fork. For example, a web server could fork itself to let the new process handle a request. A process can be parted in threads. The difference between forking a process and creating a thread is that different threads share the address space of the process. A forked process is a separate process with its own address space. Forking is more expensive in terms of memory requirement and CPU time. A user can control a process by sending signals to the process. For example, the SIGTERM command is used to terminate a process, and the SIGHUP signal to restart a process.

Process basics
This section describes some basic commands that are used for process management.

ps
The ps(1) command is used to report which processes are currently active. By running ps without any parameters you can see which processes are active in the current user session. Let’s look at an example:
$ps PID TTY 1191 pts/2 1216 pts/2 TIME CMD 00:00:00 bash 00:00:00 ps In this example the bash and ps commands are running. As you can see each process has a process ID (PID). You will need the process number if you want to send a signal to a process, for example a kill signal. The ps has many parameters to modify the output. For example, the x shows all processes without a controlling tty:$ ps x PID TTY 1044 tty1 1089 tty1 1100 tty1 1108 tty1 1113 tty1 1114 tty1 1120 tty1 1125 tty1 1146 tty1 1161 tty1

STAT S S S S S S S S S S

TIME 0:00 0:00 0:00 0:00 0:00 0:00 0:52 0:00 0:00 0:00

COMMAND -bash /bin/sh /usr/X11R6/bin/startx xinit /home/daniel/.xinitrc -/usr/bin/wmaker sylpheed /bin/sh /opt/firefox/run-mozilla.sh /opt/firefox/fire /opt/firefox/firefox-bin /usr/libexec/gconfd-2 20 xchat xterm -sb

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Chapter 10. Process management
1163 1170 1189 1191 1275 pts/0 pts/0 tty1 pts/2 pts/2 S S S S R 0:00 0:00 0:00 0:00 0:00 bash vi proc.xml xterm -sb bash ps x

Have a look at the ps(1) manual page for a summary of available parameters.

kill
The kill(1) sends a signal to a process. If no signal is speciﬁed the TERM signal is send, which asks a process to exit gracefully. Let’s have a look at the normal mode of execution:
$ps ax | grep mc 1045 tty4 S$ kill 1045 $ps ax | grep mc$

0:00 /usr/bin/mc -P /tmp/mc-daniel/mc.pwd.756

As you can see the ps is used to look for the mc process. There is one occurrence of mc running with PID 1045. This process is killed, and the second ps command shows that the process is indeed terminated. As we said earlier the kill command can also be used to send other signals. The kill -l displays a list of signals that can be sent:
1) 5) 9) 13) 18) 22) 26) 30) SIGHUP SIGTRAP SIGKILL SIGPIPE SIGCONT SIGTTOU SIGVTALRM SIGPWR 2) 6) 10) 14) 19) 23) 27) 31) SIGINT SIGABRT SIGUSR1 SIGALRM SIGSTOP SIGURG SIGPROF SIGSYS 3) 7) 11) 15) 20) 24) 28) SIGQUIT SIGBUS SIGSEGV SIGTERM SIGTSTP SIGXCPU SIGWINCH 4) 8) 12) 17) 21) 25) 29) SIGILL SIGFPE SIGUSR2 SIGCHLD SIGTTIN SIGXFSZ SIGIO

The SIGKILL signal is often used to kill processes that refuse to terminate with the default SIGTERM signal. The signal can be speciﬁed by using the number as a parameter, for example, the following command would send a SIGKILL signal to PID 1045:
$kill -9 1045 It is also possible to specify the signal without the “SIG” letters as a parameter. In the following example the SIGHUP signal is sent to the inetd to restart it: # ps ax | grep inetd 727 ? S # kill -HUP 727 0:00 /usr/sbin/inetd 65 Chapter 10. Process management Advanced process management Background processes Normally a process takes over the screen and keyboard after it is started. It is also possible to start processes as a background process, this means that the shell starts the process, but keeps control over the terminal. In most shells a process can be started as a background process by placing an ampersand (&) after the command. For example:$ rm -rf ~/bunch/of/files &

A process that runs in the background can be brought to the foreground using the fg %<job ID> command. You can see which jobs are running, with their job numbers, using the jobs command. For example:
$sleep 1000 & [1] 947$ jobs [1]+ Running $fg %1 sleep 1000 sleep 1000 & The ﬁrst command, sleep 1000 &, starts sleep in the background. sleep is a command does nothing but waiting the number of seconds that are speciﬁed as a parameter. The output of the jobs command shows that sleep is indeed running, with Job ID 1. Finally we move sleep to the foreground. As you can see, the shell will print which command is moved to the foreground. Stopping processes A process that is running can be stopped by pressing the <Control> and <z> keys simultaneously. Stopped processes can be moved to the foreground with the fg command. Running fg without any parameters moves the last process that was stopped to the foreground. Other processes can be moved to the foreground by specifying the job ID as a parameter to fg. A stopped process can also be told to continue as a background process, by executing bg <job ID>. Executing fg without any parameter will move the last stopped process to the background. Altering priorities The Linux kernel allows a user to change the priority of a program. For example, suppose that you want to run a process that requires a lot of CPU time, but you do not want to hinder other users. In this case you can start the process with a low priority, the process will only get CPU time when there are not many other processes demanding CPU time. Or you can give processes that are important a higher priority. GNU/Linux provides two commands to alter the priority of a process. The nice(1) command can be used to specify the priority when you are launching a process. With the renice(1) command you can alter the priority of a process that is already running. The priority is a numerical value from -20 (highest priority) to 19 (lowest priority). Let’s start with an example of nice in action:$ nice -n 19 ./setiathome

66

Chapter 10. Process management As you can see the -n parameter is used to specify the priority value. In this case the ./setiathome will have a very low priority. Be aware that only the superuser can use negative priority values. Thus, a normal user cannot give a process a higher priority, as illustrated by this example:
$nice -n -1 nice nice: cannot set priority: Permission denied But it will work as the root user:$ su -c "nice -n -1 nice" Password: -1

The renice command has a somewhat different syntax. The easiest way to use it is to specify the new priority and the process ID as parameters to the renice command, as is shown in the following example:
$renice +5 5811 5811: old priority 0, new priority 5 As with nice a non-root user cannot set negative priority values:$ renice -5 5811 renice: 5811: setpriority: Permission denied

Note: A normal user can not increase the priority of the process beyond the default priority of 0. Such facilities could be misused by careless users. After all, the command nice is derived from being nice to the other users on the system ;^).

67

III. Editing and typesetting

Chapter 11. LaTeX
Introduction
LaTeX is a typesetting system that can be used to produce high-quality articles, books, letters and other publications. LaTeX is based on TeX, a lower-level typesetting language that was designed by Donald E. Knuth. LaTeX does not work like a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) word processor, the kind of document preparation system most people are accustomed to. With LaTeX you do not have to care about formatting the document, only about writing the document. LaTeX ﬁles are plain-text ﬁles that contain LaTeX macros. LaTeX formats the document based on the macros that are used. In the beginning using LaTeX may be a bit awkward to a new user. But after a while you will discover that using LaTeX has some distinct advantages. To name a few:
• •

LaTeX-formatted documents look very professional. You do not have to care about the layout of your documents. You just add structure to your documents, and LaTeX takes care of the formatting. LaTeX ﬁles are plain text, and can easily be changed using standard UNIX tools, such as vi, sed or awk LaTeX provides very good support for typesetting things like mathematical formula, references and Postscript images.

•

•

LaTeX is very extensive, so this chapter will only touch the surface of LaTeX. But it should be enough to get you started to be able to make simple documents.

Preparing basic LaTeX documents
Minimal document structure
Each LaTeX document has some basic minimal structure that describes the document. Let’s look at an example:
\documentclass[10pt,a4paper]{article}  \title{The history of symmetric ciphers}  \author{John Doe}  \begin{document}  This is a basic document.  \end{document}

You can already see the basic syntactical structure of LaTeX commands. A command is started with a backslash, followed by the name of the command. Each macro has a mandatory argument that is placed in accolades, and an optional argument that is placed in square brackets.

69

Chapter 11. LaTeX  The ﬁrst command in every document is the documentclass. This command speciﬁes what kind of document LaTeX is dealing with. The type of document is speciﬁed as a mandatory parameter. You can also specify some optional parameters, such as the font size and the paper size. In this case the font size is changed from the default 12pt to 10pt, and A4 is used as the paper size. The document classes that are available in LaTeX are shown in Table 11-1. After the documentclass you can add some meta-information to the document, like the title of the document. In this case the title is The history of symmetric ciphers. The author command speciﬁes the author of the book. The \begin command marks the beginning of an environment. There are many different environments, but they all implicate certain typesetting conventions for the text that is in an environment. In this case we start an document environment. This is a very basic environment, LaTeX interprets everything in this environment as the body of the text. The content of the document can be placed within the document, in this case a friendly warning about the nature of the document. All environments eventually have to be closed. The document environment is the last environment that is closed, because it denotes the end of the body of the text.

Table 11-1. LaTeX document classes Class article book letter report

Generating printable formats
Once you have a LaTeX ﬁle, you can use the latex command to generate a DVI (Device Independent format) ﬁle:
$latex crypto.tex This is pdfeTeX, Version 3.141592-1.21a-2.2 (Web2C 7.5.4) entering extended mode (./crypto.tex LaTeX2e <2003/12/01> Babel <v3.8d> and hyphenation patterns for american, french, german, ngerman, b ahasa, basque, bulgarian, catalan, croatian, czech, danish, dutch, esperanto, e stonian, finnish, greek, icelandic, irish, italian, latin, magyar, norsk, polis h, portuges, romanian, russian, serbian, slovak, slovene, spanish, swedish, tur kish, ukrainian, nohyphenation, loaded. (/usr/share/texmf/tex/latex/base/article.cls Document Class: article 2004/02/16 v1.4f Standard LaTeX document class (/usr/share/texmf/tex/latex/base/size10.clo)) (./crypto.aux) [1] (./crypto.aux) ) Output written on crypto.dvi (1 page, 248 bytes). Transcript written on crypto.log. As the LaTeX command reports a DVI ﬁle is created after running the latex command. You can view this ﬁle with an X viewer for DVI ﬁles, xdvi: 70 Chapter 11. LaTeX$ xdvi crypto.dvi

This ﬁle is not directly printable (although DVI ﬁles can be printed with xdvi). An ideal format for printable ﬁles is Postscript. You can generate a Postscript ﬁle from the DVI ﬁle with one simple command:
$dvips -o crypto.ps crypto.dvi The -o speciﬁes the output (ﬁle) for the Postscript document. If this parameter is not speciﬁed, the output will be piped through lpr, which will schedule the document to be printed. PDF (Portable Document Format) is another popular format for electronic documents. PDF can easily be generated from Postscript:$ ps2pdf crypto.ps

The resulting output ﬁle will be the same as the input ﬁle, with the .ps extension replaced with .pdf.

Sections
\documentclass[10pt,a4paper]{article} \title{The history of symmetric ciphers} \author{John Doe} \begin{document} \section{Pre-war ciphers} To be done. \section{Modern ciphers} \subsection*{Rijndael} Rijndael is a modern block cipher that was designed by Joan Daemen and Vincent Rijmen. In the year 2000 the US National Institute of Standards and Technologies selected Rijndael as the winner in the contest for becoming the Advanced Encryption Standard, the successor of DES. \end{document}

71

Chapter 11. LaTeX The example above is pretty straightforward, but this is a good time to look at how LaTeX treats end of line characters and empty lines. Empty lines are ignored by LaTeX, making the text a continuous ﬂow. An empty line starts a new paragraph. All paragraphs but the ﬁrst paragraph are stared with a extra space left of the ﬁrst word.

Font styles
Usually you may want to work with different font styles too. LaTeX has some commands that can be used to change the appearance of the current font. The most commonly used font commands are \emph for emphasized text, and \textbf . Have a look at Table 11-2 for a more extensive list of font styles. Emphasis and bold text are demonstrated in this example paragraph:
Working with font styles is easy. \emp{This text is emphasized} and \textbf{this text is bold}.

Table 11-2. LaTeX font styles Command \emph \textbf \textit \textsl \textsc \texttt \textsf Description Add emphasis to a font. Print the text in bold. Use an italic font. Use a font that is slanted. Use CAPS. Use a typewriter font. Use a sans-serif font.

72

IV. Electronic mail

Chapter 12. Reading and writing e-mail with mutt
Introduction
Mutt is a mail user agent (MUA) that can be used for reading and writing e-mail. Mutt is a text-mode installation, meaning that it can be used on the console, over SSH and in an X terminal. Due to its menu interface, it is very easy to read large amounts of e-mail in a short time, and mutt can be conﬁgured to use your favorite text editor. This chapter will discuss how you can customize mutt for your needs, how to use it, and how PGP/GnuPG support is used.

Usage
Mutt is pretty simple to use, though it may take some time to get used to the keys that are used to navigate, read and write e-mails. The next few sections describe some of the more important keys. Mutt provides a more thorough overview of available keys after pressing the <h> key.

Browsing the list of e-mails
After invoking the mutt command, an overview of all e-mails will show up. You can browse through the list of e-mails with the up and down arrow keys, or the <k> and >j> keys.

To read an e-mail, use the <Enter> key, after selecting an e-mail in the overview of e-mails. When reading an e-mail you can use the <Page Up> and <Page Down> to browse through an e-mail. You can still use the navigational keys used to browse the list of e-mail to browse to other e-mails. If an e-mail has any attachments, you can see them by pressing the <v> key. You can view individual attachments by selecting them and pressing the <Enter> key. To save an attachment to a ﬁle, press the <s> key.

Sending e-mails
You can compose a new e-mail with the <c> key, or reply to a selected e-mail with the <r> key. Mutt will ask you to specify the recipient (To:), and a subject (Subject:). After entering this information an editor is launched (vi is used by default), which you can use to compose the e-mail. After saving the e-mail, and quitting the editor, mutt will give you the opportunity to make any changes to the e-mail. If you decide that you want to alter the e-mail, you can restart the editor with the <e> key. You can change the recipient or the subject with respectively <t> or <s>. Finally, you can send the e-mail by pressing <y>. If you would like to cancel the e-mail, press <q>. Mutt will ask you whether you want to postpone the e-mail. If you do so, you will be given the opportunity to re-do the e-mail the next time you compose a message.

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Chapter 12. Reading and writing e-mail with mutt

Basic setup
There are a few mutt settings you often want to conﬁgure. This section describes these settings. User-speciﬁc mutt customizations can be made in the .muttrc in the user’s home directory. You can change global mutt settings in /etc/mutt/Muttrc.

Each e-mail has headers with various information. For example, the header contains information about the path an e-mail has traversed after it has been sent. The sender (From:) and recipient (To:) e-mail addresses are also stored in the headers, as well as the subject (Subject:) of an e-mail.
Note: In reality the To: header is not used to determine the destination of an e-mail during the deliverance process of the e-mail. MTAs use the envelope address to determine the destination of the e-mail. Though, most MUAs use the To: address that the user ﬁlls in as the envelope address.

my_hdr X-Operating-System: Slackware Linux 10.2

You can also override some of the headers that are normally used, such as the sender address that is speciﬁed in the From: header:
my_hdr From: John Doe <john.doe@example.org>

The sendmail binary
By default mutt uses the sendmail MTA to deliver e-mails that were sent. You can use another command to send e-mail by altering the sendmail conﬁguration variable. The sendmail replacement must handle the same parameter syntax as sendmail. For example, if you have installed MSMTP to deliver e-mails, you can conﬁgure mutt to use it by adding the following line to your mutt conﬁguration:
set sendmail="/usr/bin/msmtp"

When you have completely replaced sendmail with another MTA, for instance Postﬁx, it is usually not needed to set this parameter, because most MTAs provide an alternative sendmail binary ﬁle.

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Chapter 12. Reading and writing e-mail with mutt

Signing/encrypting e-mails
Introduction
Mutt provides excellent support for signing or encrypting e-mails with GnuPG. One might wonder why he or she should use one of these techniques. While most people do not feel the need to encrypt most of their e-mails, it generally is a good idea to sign your e-mails. There are, for example, a lot of viruses these days that use other people’s e-mail addresses in the From: ﬁeld of viruses. If the people who you are communicating with know that you sign your e-mails, they will not open fake e-mail from viruses. Besides that it looks much more professional if people can check your identity, especially in business transactions. For example, who would you rather trust, vampire_boy93853@hotmail.com, or someone using a professional e-mail address with digitally signed e-mails? This section describes how you can use GnuPG with mutt, for more information about GnuPG read the section called Encrypting and signing ﬁles in Chapter 8.

Conﬁguration
An example conﬁguration for using GnuPG in mutt can be found in /usr/share/doc/mutt/samples/gpg.rc. In general the contents of this ﬁle to your mutt conﬁguration will sufﬁce. From the shell you can add the contents of this ﬁle to you .muttrc with the following command:
$cat /usr/share/doc/mutt/samples/gpg.rc >> ~/.muttrc There are some handy parameters that you can additionally set. For example, if you always want to sign e-mails, add the following line to your mutt conﬁguration: set crypt_autosign = yes Another handy option is crypt_replyencrypt, which will automatically encrypt replies to messages that were encrypted. To enable this, add the following line to your mutt conﬁguration: set crypt_replyencrypt = yes Usage If you have set some of the automatical options, like crypt_autosign GnuPG usage of mutt is mostly automatic. If not, you can press the <p> key during the ﬁnal step of sending an e-mail. In the bottom of the screen various GnuPG/PGP options will appear, which you can access via the letters that are enclosed in parentheses. For example, <s> signs e-mails, and <e> encrypts an e-mail. You can always clear any GnuPG option you set by pressing <p> and then <c>. 76 Chapter 13. Sendmail Introduction Sendmail is the default Mail Transfer Agent (MTA) that Slackware Linux uses. sendmail was originally written by Eric Allman, who still maintains sendmail. The primary role of the sendmail MTA is delivering messages, either locally or remotely. Delivery is usually done through the SMTP protocol. The means that sendmail can accept e-mail from remote sites through the SMTP port, and that sendmail delivers site destined for remote sites to other SMTP servers. Installation Sendmail is available as the sendmail package in the “n” disk set. If you want to generate your own sendmail conﬁguration ﬁles, the sendmail-cf package is also required. For information about how to install packages on Slackware Linux, refer to Chapter 18. You can let Slackware Linux start sendmail during each boot by making the /etc/rc.d/rc.sendmail executable. You can do this by executing: # chmod a+x /etc/rc.d/rc.sendmail You can also start, stop and restart sendmail by using start, stop, and restart as a parameter to the sendmail initialization script. For example, you can restart sendmail in the following way: # /etc/rc.d/rc.sendmail restart Conﬁguration The most central sendmail conﬁguration ﬁle is /etc/mail/sendmail.cf; this is where the behavior of sendmail is conﬁgured, and where other ﬁles are included. The syntax of /etc/mail/sendmail.cf is somewhat obscure, because this ﬁle is compiled from a much simpler .mc ﬁles that uses M4 macros that are deﬁned for sendmail. Some deﬁnitions can easily be changed in the /etc/mail/sendmail.cf ﬁle, but for other changes it is better to create your own .mc ﬁle. Examples in this chapter will be focused on creating a customized mc ﬁle. Working with mc ﬁles In this section we will look how you can start off with an initial mc ﬁle, and how to compile your own .cf ﬁle to a cf ﬁle. There are many interesting example mc ﬁles available in /usr/share/sendmail/cf/cf. The most interesting examples are sendmail-slackware.mc (which is used for generating the default Slackware Linux sendmail.cf), and sendmail-slackware-tls.mc which adds TLS support to the standard Slackware Linux sendmail conﬁguration. If you want to create your own sendmail conﬁguration, it is a good idea to 77 Chapter 13. Sendmail start with a copy of the standard Slackware Linux mc ﬁle. For instance, suppose that we would like to create a conﬁguration ﬁle for the server named straw, we could execute: # cd /usr/share/sendmail/cf/cf # cp sendmail-slackware.mc sendmail-straw.mc and start editing sendmail-straw.mc. After the conﬁguration ﬁle is modiﬁed to our tastes, M4 can be used to compile a cf ﬁle: # m4 sendmail-straw.mc > sendmail-straw.cf If we want to use this new conﬁguration ﬁle as the default conﬁguration, we can copy it to /etc/mail/sendmail.cf: # cp sendmail-straw.cf /etc/mail/sendmail.cf Using a smarthost If you would like to use another host to deliver e-mail to locations to which the sendmail server you are conﬁguring can not deliver you can set up sendmail to use a so-called “smart host”. Sendmail will send the undeliverable e-mail to the smart host, which is in turn supposed to handle the e-mail. You do this by deﬁning SMART_HOST in your mc ﬁle. For example, if you want to use smtp2.example.org as the smart host, you can add the following line: define(‘SMART_HOST’,‘stmp2.example.org’) Alternative host/domain names By default sendmail will accept mail destined for localhost, and the current hostname of the system. You can simply add additional hosts or domains to accept e-mail for. The ﬁrst step is to make sure that the following line is added to your mc conﬁguration: FEATURE(‘use_cw_file’)dnl When this option is enabled you can add host names and domain names to accept mail for to /etc/mail/local-host-names. This ﬁle is a newline separated database of names. For example, the ﬁle could look like this: example.org mail.example.org www.example.org 78 Chapter 13. Sendmail Virtual user table Often you may want to map e-mail addresses to user names. This is needed when the user name differs from the part before the “@” part of an e-mail address. To enable this functionality, make sure the following line is added to your mc ﬁle: FEATURE(‘virtusertable’,‘hash -o /etc/mail/virtusertable.db’)dnl The mappings will now be read from /etc/mail/virtusertable.db. This is a binary database ﬁle that should not directly edit. You can edit /etc/mail/virtusertable instead, and generate /etc/mail/virtusertable.db from that ﬁle. The /etc/mail/virtusertable ﬁle is a simple plain text ﬁle. That has a mapping on each line, with an e-mail address and a user name separated by a tab. For example: john.doe@example.org john john.doe@mail.example.org john In this example both e-mail for john.doe@example.org and john.doe@mail.example.org will be delivered to the john account. It is also possible to deliver some e-mail destined for a domain that is hosted on the server to another e-mail address, by specifying the e-mail address to deliver the e-mail to in the second in the second column. For example: john.doe@example.org john.doe@example.com After making the necessary changes to the virtusertable ﬁle you can generate the database with the following command: # makemap hash /etc/mail/virtusertable < /etc/mail/virtusertable 79 Chapter 14. Spamassassin Introduction Spam E-Mail is one of the major problems of the current Internet. Fortunately there are some tools which can help you reducing the amount of spam you get. One of them is using blacklists. A blacklist is a list of known open e-mail relays. With a blacklist you can block e-mails which are sent using one of these open relays. Unfortunately there are a few problems with this method, ﬁrst of all the database of open relays can never be complete. Besides that some spam is sent using normal ISP-speciﬁc SMTP servers. Another method is scanning the incoming e-mails for common characteristics of spam. This method is comparable with a virus scanner; a ﬁlter program knows a large number of spam characteristics and gives each characteristic found in a mail a point. If a deﬁned number of points is exceeded the mail is marked as spam. Spamassassin is that kind of ﬁlter. Installing spamassasin SpamAssassin SpamAssassin is written in Perl, and is available through CPAN (Comprehensive Perl Archive Network). You can install SpamAssassin through the CPAN shell. Execute the following command to enter the CPAN shell: # perl -MCPAN -e shell Once the shell is started you can install SpamAssassin: # o conf prerequisites_policy ask # install Mail::SpamAssassin The ﬁrst command will make the installation of dependencies interactive (in other words, the CPAN shell will ask you to conﬁrm their installation). The second command asks the CPAN shell to install SpamAssassin. During the installation you will be asked to ﬁll in the e-mail address of the e-mail address or URL that should be used in the report that is sent when something is suspected to be spam. You will also be asked whether you would like to conduct some tests or not. You can answer “n” to these questions. Starting spamd It is not a bad idea to start a daemonized version of SpamAssassin which runs in the background. This will speed up mail ﬁltering. The daemon can be started using the following command: # spamd -c -d 80 Chapter 14. Spamassassin It is a good idea tot add this to /etc/rc.local, so spamd will automatically be started during the initialization process. Using spamassassin with procmail Sendmail will use procmail automatically on the default Slackware Linux installation if procmail is installed. Procmail is a program which processes e-mails and allows you to apply ﬁlters. At ﬁrst we are going to have a look at how to add spamassassin headers to a processed e-mail, after that we are going to look at a method to separate spam from normal e-mail. Marking messages as spam The ﬁrst step is to mark messages as either spam or non-spam. Create a /etc/procmailrc ﬁle, if you do not already have one. This is the system-wide procmail conﬁguration ﬁle, and applies to all incoming e-mails. Use the ~/.procmailrc ﬁle if you want to enable spam marking for an individual account. Add the following lines to the conﬁguration ﬁle: :0 fw * < 256000 | /usr/bin/spamc -f The ﬁrst line says we want to pipe all messages to an external command. The second line makes sure only messages smaller than 256000 bytes are ﬁltered. Spam messages are usually not that large, and adding this line can decrease the system load. Finally, the third line speciﬁes that the messages should be piped through /usr/bin/spamc with the -f parameter. Moving spam mail to a separate mailbox Procmail can also be used to move spam to a separate mailbox ﬁle. It is not a bad idea to conﬁgure this on a user basis, because some users might want to use the ﬁlters of their e-mail program to separate spam. In the following example we will move spam messages to the ~/mail/spam mailbox ﬁle. To do this add the following lines to ~/.procmailrc: MAILDIR=$HOME/mail :0: * ^X-Spam-Status: Yes spam

First of all MAILDIR is deﬁned, this will create and use the mailboxes in ~/mail/. In the next two lines we say that we want to ﬁlter out e-mails with the X-Spam-Status: Yes header, which is added by spamassassin if it believes an e-mail is spam. Finally the mailbox to which the e-mails should be moved is speciﬁed.

81

Chapter 15. User management
Introduction

The useradd is used to add user accounts to the system. Running useradd with a user name as parameter will create the user on the system. For example:

Creates the user account bob. Please be aware that this does not create a home directory for the user. Add the -m parameter to create a home directory. For example:

This would add the user bob to the system, and create the /home/bob home directory for this user. Normally the user is made a member of the users group. Suppose that we would like to make crew the primary group for the user bob. This can be done using the -g parameter. For example:
# useradd -g crew -m bob

It is also possible to add this user to secondary groups during the creation of the account with the -G. Group names can be separated with a comma. The following command would create the user bob, which is a member of the crew group, and the www-admins and ftp-admins secondary groups:

83

Chapter 15. User management By default the useradd only adds users, it does not set a password for the added user. Passwords can be set using the passwd command.

passwd
As you probably guessed the passwd command is used to set a password for a user. Running this command as a user without a parameter will change the password for this user. The password command will ask for the old password,once and twice for the new password:
$passwd Changing password for bob (current) UNIX password: Enter new UNIX password: Retype new UNIX password: passwd: password updated successfully The root user can set passwords for users by specifying the user name as a parameter. The passwd command will only ask for the new password. For example: # passwd bob Enter new UNIX password: Retype new UNIX password: passwd: password updated successfully adduser The adduser command combines useradd and passwd in an interactive script. It will ask you to ﬁll in information about the account to-be created. After that it will create an account based on the information you provided. The screen listing below shows a sample session. # adduser Login name for new user []: john User ID (’UID’) [ defaults to next available ]: <Enter> Initial group [ users ]: <Enter> Additional groups (comma separated) []: staff Home directory [ /home/john ] <Enter> Shell [ /bin/bash ] <Enter> Expiry date (YYYY-MM-DD) []: <Enter> New account will be created as follows: --------------------------------------Login name.......: john UID..............: [ Next available ] Initial group....: users 84 Chapter 15. User management Additional groups: Home directory...: Shell............: Expiry date......: [ None ] /home/john /bin/bash [ Never ] Otherwise, press This is it... if you want to bail out, hit Control-C. ENTER to go ahead and make the account. <Enter> Creating new account... Changing the user information for john Enter the new value, or press ENTER for the default Full Name []: John Doe Room Number []: <Enter> Work Phone []: <Enter> Home Phone []: <Enter> Other []: <Enter> Changing password for john Enter the new password (minimum of 5, maximum of 127 characters) Please use a combination of upper and lower case letters and numbers. New password: password Re-enter new password: password Account setup complete. You can use the default values, or leave some ﬁelds empty, by tapping the <Enter> key. userdel Sometimes it is necessary to remove a user account from the system. GNU/Linux offers the userdel tool to do this. Just specify the username as a parameter to remove that user from the system. For example, the following command will remove the user account bob from the system: # userdel bob This will only remove the user account, not the user’s home directory and mail spool. Just add the -r parameter to delete the user’s home directory and mail spool too. For example: # userdel -r bob Avoiding root usage with su It is a good idea to avoid logging in as root. There are many reasons for not doing this. Accidentally typing a wrong command could cause bad things to happen, and malicious programs can make a lot of damage when you are logged in as root. Still, there are many situations in which you need to have 85 Chapter 15. User management root access. For example, to do system administration, or to install new software. Fortunately the su can give you temporal root privileges. Using su is very simple. Just executing su will ask you for the root password, and will start a shell with root privileges after the password is correctly entered:$ whoami bob $su Password: # whoami root # exit exit$ whoami bob

In this example the user bob is logged on, the whoami output reﬂects this. The user executes su and enters the root password. su launches a shell with root privileges, this is conﬁrmed by the whoami output. After exiting the root shell, control is returned to the original running shell running with the privileges of the user bob. It is also possible to execute just one command as the root user with the -c parameter. The following example will run lilo:
$su -c lilo If you want to give parameters to the command you would like to run, use quotes (e.g. su -c "ls -l /"). Without quotes su cannot determine whether the parameters should be used by the speciﬁed command, or by su itself. Restricting su access You can reﬁne access to su with suauth(5). It is a good security practice to only allow members of a special group to su to root. For instance, you can restrict root su-ing in a BSD fashion to members of the wheel group by adding the following line to /etc/suauth: root:ALL EXCEPT GROUP wheel:DENY Disk quota Introduction Disk quota is a mechanism that allows the system administrator to restrict the number of disk blocks and inodes that a particular user and group can use. Not all ﬁlesystems supported by Linux support quota, widely used ﬁlesystems that support quota are ext2, ext3 and XFS. Quota are turned on and managed on a per ﬁlesystem basis. 86 Chapter 15. User management Enabling quota Quota can be enabled per ﬁlesystem in /etc/fstab, by using the usrquota and grpquota ﬁlesystem options. For example, suppose that we have the following entry for the /home partition in /etc/fstab: /dev/hda8 /home xfs defaults 1 2 We can now enable user quota by adding the usrquota ﬁlesystem option: /dev/hda8 /home xfs defaults,usrquota 1 2 At this point the machine can be rebooted, to let the Slackware Linux initialization scripts enable quota. You can also enable quota without rebooting the machine, by remounting the partition, and running the quotaon command: # mount -o remount /home # quotaon -avug Editing quota User and group quotas can be edited with the “edquota” utility. This program allows you to edit quotas interactively with the vi editor. The most basic syntax of this command is edquota username. For example: # edquota joe This will launch the vi editor with the quota information for the user joe. It will look like this: Disk quotas for user joe (uid 1143): Filesystem blocks /dev/hda5 2136 soft 0 hard 0 inodes 64 soft 0 hard 0 In this example quotas are only turned on for one ﬁle system, namely the ﬁlesystem on /dev/hda5. As you can see there are multiple columns. The blocks column shows how many block the user uses on the ﬁle system, and the inodes column the number of inodes a user occupies. Besides that there are soft and hard columns after both blocks and inodes. These columns specify the soft and hard limits on blocks and inodes. A user can exceed the soft limit for a grace period, but the user can never exceed the hard limit. If the value of a limit is 0, there is no limit. Note: The term “blocks” might be a bit confusing in this context. In the quota settings a block is 1KB, not the block size of the ﬁle system. Let’s look at a simple example. Suppose that we would like to set the soft limit for the user joe to 250000, and the hard limit to 300000. We could change the quotas listed above to: Disk quotas for user joe (uid 1143): Filesystem blocks soft hard inodes soft hard 87 Chapter 15. User management /dev/hda5 2136 250000 300000 64 0 0 The new quota settings for this user will be active after saving the ﬁle, and quitting vi. Getting information about quota It is often useful to get statistics about the current quota usage. The repquota command can be used to get information about what quotas are set for every user, and how much of each quota is used. You can see the quota settings for a speciﬁc partition by giving the name of the partition as a parameter. The -a parameter will show quota information for all partitions with quota enabled. Suppose that you would like to see quota information for /dev/hda5, you can use the following command: repquota /dev/hda5 *** Report for user quotas on device /dev/hda5 Block grace time: 7days; Inode grace time: 7days Block limits File limits User used soft hard grace used soft hard grace ---------------------------------------------------------------------root -0 0 0 3 0 0 [..] joe -2136 250000 300000 64 0 0 [..] 88 Chapter 16. Printer conﬁguration Introduction GNU/Linux supports a large share of the available USB, parallel and network printers. Slackware Linux provides two printing systems, CUPS (Common UNIX Printing System) and LPRNG (LPR Next Generation). This chapter covers the CUPS system. Independent of which printing system you are going to use, it is a good idea to install some printer ﬁlter collections. These can be found in the “ap” disk set. If you want to have support for most printers, make sure the following packages are installed: a2ps enscript espgs gimp-print gnu-gs-fonts hpijs ifhp Both printing systems have their own advantages and disadvantages. If you do not have much experience with conﬁguring printers under GNU/Linux, it is a good idea to use CUPS, because CUPS provides a comfortable web interface which can be accessed through a web browser. Preparations To be able to use CUPS the “cups” package from the “a” disk set has to be installed. After the installation CUPS can be started automatically during each system boot by making /etc/rc.d/rc.cups executable. This can be done with the following command: # chmod a+x /etc/rc.d/rc.cups After restarting the system CUPS will also be restarted automatically. You can start CUPS on a running system by executing the following command: # /etc/rc.d/rc.cups start Conﬁguration CUPS can be conﬁgured via a web interface. The conﬁguration interface can be accessed with a web browser at the following URL: http://localhost:631/. Some parts of the web interface require that you authenticate yourself. If an authentication window pops up you can enter “root” as the user name, and ﬁll in the root account password. A printer can be added to the CUPS conﬁguration by clicking on “Administrate”, and clicking on the “Add Printer” button after that. The web interface will ask for three options: 89 Chapter 16. Printer conﬁguration • • Name - the name of the printer. Use a simple name, for example “epson”. Location - the physical location of the printer. This setting is not crucial, but handy for larger organizations. Description - a description of the printer, for example “Epson Stylus Color C42UX”. • You can proceed by clicking the “Continue” button. On the next page you can conﬁgure how the printer is connected. If you have an USB printer which is turned on, the web interface will show the name of the printer next to the USB port that is used. After conﬁguring the printer port you can select the printer brand and model. After that the printer conﬁguration is ﬁnished, and the printer will be added to the CUPS conﬁguration. An overview of the conﬁgured printers can be found on the “Printers” page. On this page you can also do some printer operations. For example, “Print Test Page” can be used to check the printer conﬁguration by printing a test page. Access control The CUPS printing system provides a web conﬁguration interface, and remote printer access through the Internet Printing Protocol (IPP). The CUPS conﬁguration ﬁles allow you to conﬁgure ﬁne-grained access control to printers. By default access to printers is limited to localhost (127.0.0.1). You can reﬁne access control in the central CUPS daemon conﬁguration ﬁle, /etc/cups/cupsd.conf, which has a syntax that is comparable to the Apache conﬁguration ﬁle. Access control is conﬁgured through Location sections. For example, the default global (IPP root directory) section looks like this: <Location /> Order Deny,Allow Deny From All Allow From 127.0.0.1 </Location> As you can see deny statements are handled ﬁrst, and then allow statements. In the default conﬁguration access is denied from all hosts, except for 127.0.0.1, localhost. Suppose that you would like to allow hosts from the local network, which uses the 192.168.1.0/24 address space, to use the printers on the system you are conﬁguring CUPS on. In this case you could add the line that is bold: <Location /> Order Deny,Allow Deny From All Allow From 127.0.0.1 Allow From 192.168.1.0/24 </Location> You can reﬁne other locations in the address space by adding additional location sections. Settings for sub-directories override global settings. For example, you could restrict access to the epson printer to the hosts with IP addresses 127.0.0.1 and 192.168.1.203 by adding the following section: <Location /printers/epson> Order Deny,Allow Deny From All 90 Chapter 16. Printer conﬁguration Allow From 127.0.0.1 Allow From 192.168.1.203 </Location> Ghostscript paper size Ghostscript is a PostStript and Portable Document Format (PDF) interpreter. Both PostScript and PDF are languages that describe data that can be printed. Ghostscript is used to convert PostScript and PDF to raster formats that can be displayed on the screen or printed. Most UNIX programs output PostScript, the CUPS spooler uses GhostScript to convert this PostScript to rasterized format that a particular printer understands. There are some Ghostscript conﬁguration settings that may be useful to change in some situations. This section describes how you can change the default paper size that Ghostscript uses. Note: Some higher-end printers can directly interpret PostScript. Rasterization is not needed for these printers. By default Ghostscript uses US letter paper as the default paper size. The paper size is conﬁgured in /usr/share/ghostscript/x.xx/lib/gs_init.ps, in which x.xx should be replaced by the Ghostscript version number. Not far after the beginning of the ﬁle there are two lines that are commented out with a percent (%) sign, that look like this: % Optionally choose a default paper size other than U.S. letter. % (a4) /PAPERSIZE where { pop pop } { /PAPERSIZE exch def } ifelse You can change the Ghostscript conﬁguration to use A4 as the default paper size by removing the percent sign and space that are at the start of the second line, changing it to: % Optionally choose a default paper size other than U.S. letter. (a4) /PAPERSIZE where { pop pop } { /PAPERSIZE exch def } ifelse It is also possible to use another paper size than Letter or A4 by replacing a4 in the example above with the paper size you want to use. For example, you could set the default paper size to US Legal with: % Optionally choose a default paper size other than U.S. letter. (legal) /PAPERSIZE where { pop pop } { /PAPERSIZE exch def } ifelse It is also possible to set the paper size per invocation of Ghostscript by using the -sPAPERSIZE=size parameter of the gs command. For example, you could use add -sPAPERSIZE=a4 parameter when you start gs to use A4 as the paper size for an invocation of Ghostscript. An overview of supported paper sizes can be found in the gs_statd.ps, that can be found in the same directory as gs_init.ps. 91 Chapter 17. X11 X Conﬁguration The X11 conﬁguration is stored in /etc/X11/xorg.conf. Many distributions provide special conﬁguration tools for X, but Slackware Linux only provides the standard X11 tools (which are actually quite easy to use). In most cases X can be conﬁgured automatically, but sometimes it is necessary to edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf manually. Automatical conﬁguration The X11 server provides an option to automatically generate a conﬁguration ﬁle. X11 will load all available driver modules, and will try to detect the hardware, and generate a conﬁguration ﬁle. Execute the following command to generate a xorg.conf conﬁguration ﬁle:$ X -configure

If X does not output any errors, the generated conﬁguration can be copied to the /etc/X11 directory. And X can be started to test the conﬁguration:
$cp /root/xorg.conf /etc/X11/$ startx

Interactive conﬁguration
X11 provides two tools for conﬁguring X interactively, xorgcfg and xorgconﬁg. xorgcfg tries to detect the video card automatically, and starts a tool which can be used to tune the conﬁguration. Sometimes xorgcfg switches to a video mode which is not supported by the monitor. In that case xorgcfg can also be used in text-mode, by starting it with xorgcfg -textmode. xorgconﬁg differs from the tools described above, it does not detect hardware and will ask detailed questions about your hardware. If you only have little experience conﬁguring X11 it is a good idea to avoid xorgconﬁg.

Window manager
The “look and feel” of X11 is managed by a so-called window manager. Slackware Linux provides the following widely user window managers:
• • •

WindowMaker: A relatively light window manager, which is part of the GNUStep project. BlackBlox: Light window manager, BlackBox has no dependencies except the X11 libraries. KDE: A complete desktop environment, including browser, e-mail program and an ofﬁce suite (KOfﬁce). GNOME: Like KDE a complete desktop environment. It is worth noting that Dropline Systems (http://www.dropline.net/) provides a special GNOME environment for Slackware Linux.

•

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Chapter 17. X11 If you are used to a desktop environment, using KDE or GNOME is a logical choice. But it is a good idea to try some of the lighter window managers. They are faster, and consumer less memory, besides that most KDE and GNOME applications are perfectly usable under other window managers. On Slackware Linux the following command can be used to select a window manager:
$xwmconfig This conﬁguration program shows the installed window managers, from which you can choose one. You can set the window manager globally by executing xwmconﬁg as root. 93 Chapter 18. Package Management Pkgtools Introduction Slackware Linux does not use a complex package system, unlike many other Linux distributions. Package have the .tgz extension, and are usually ordinary tarballs which contain two extra ﬁles: an installation script and a package description ﬁle. Due to the simplicity of the packages the Slackware Linux package tools do not have the means to handle dependencies. But many Slackware Linux users prefer this approach, because dependencies often cause more problems than they solve. Slackware Linux has a few tools to handle packages. The most important tools will be covered in this chapter. To learn to understand the tools we need to have a look at package naming. Let’s have a look at an example, imagine that we have a package with the ﬁle name bash-2.05b-i386-2.tgz. In this case the name of the package is bash-2.05b-i386-2. In the package name information about the package is separated by the ’-’ character. A package name has the following meaning: programname-version-architecture-packagerevision pkgtool The pkgtool command provides a menu interface for some package operations. De most important menu items are Remove and Setup. The Remove option presents a list of installed packages. You can select which packages you want to remove with the space bar and conﬁrm your choices with the return key. You can also deselect a package for removal with the space bar. The Setup option provides access to a few tools which can help you with conﬁguring your system, for example: netconﬁg, pppconﬁg and xwmconﬁg. installpkg The installpkg command is used to install packages. installpkg needs a package ﬁle as a parameter. For example, if you want to install the package bash-2.05b-i386-2.tgz execute: # installpkg bash-2.05b-i386-2.tgz upgradepkg upgradepkg can be used to upgrade packages. In contrast to installpkg it only installs packages when there is an older version available on the system. The command syntax is comparable to installpkg. For example, if you want to upgrade packages using package in a directory execute: # upgradepkg *.tgz As said only those packages will be installed of which an other version is already installed on the system. 94 Chapter 18. Package Management removepkg The removepkg can be used to remove installed packages. For example, if you want to remove the “bash” package (it is not recommended to do that!), you can execute: # removepkg bash As you can see only the name of the package is speciﬁed in this example. You can also remove a package by specifying its full name: # removepkg bash-2.05b-i386-2 Slackpkg Introduction Slackpkg is a package tool written by Roberto F. Batista and Evaldo Gardenali. It helps users to install and upgrade Slackware Linux packages using one of the Slackware Linux mirrors. Slackpkg is included in the extra/ directory on the second CD of the Slackware Linux CD set. Conﬁguration Slackpkg is conﬁgured through some ﬁles in /etc/slackpkg. The ﬁrst thing you should do is conﬁguring which mirror slackpkg should use. This can be done by editing the /etc/slackpkg/mirrors. This ﬁle already contains a list of mirrors, you can just uncomment a mirror close to you. For example: ftp://ftp.nluug.nl/pub/os/Linux/distr/slackware/slackware-10.2/ This will use the Slackware Linux 10.2 tree on the ftp.nluug.nl mirror. Be sure to use a tree that matches your Slackware Linux version. If you would like to track slackware-current you would uncomment the following line instead (when you would like to use the NLUUG mirror): ftp://ftp.nluug.nl/pub/os/Linux/distr/slackware/slackware-current/ Slackpkg will only accept one mirror. Commenting out more mirrors will not work. Importing the Slackware Linux GPG key By default slackpkg checks packages using the package signatures and the public Slackware Linux GPG key. Since this is a good idea from a security point of view, you probably do not want to change this behaviour. To be able to verify packages you have to import the security@slackware.com GPG key. If you have not used GPG before you have to create the GPG directory in the home directory of the root user: 95 Chapter 18. Package Management # mkdir ~/.gnupg The next step is to search for the public key of security@slackware.com. We will do this by querying the pgp.mit.edu server: # gpg --keyserver pgp.mit.edu --search security@slackware.com gpg: keyring ‘/root/.gnupg/secring.gpg’ created gpg: keyring ‘/root/.gnupg/pubring.gpg’ created gpg: searching for "security@slackware.com" from HKP server pgp.mit.edu Keys 1-2 of 2 for "security@slackware.com" (1) Slackware Linux Project <security@slackware.com> 1024 bit DSA key 40102233, created 2003-02-25 (2) Slackware Linux Project <security@slackware.com> 1024 bit DSA key 40102233, created 2003-02-25 Enter number(s), N)ext, or Q)uit > As you can see we have got two (identical) hits. Select the ﬁrst one by entering “1”. GnuPG will import this key in the keyring of the root user: Enter number(s), N)ext, or Q)uit > 1 gpg: key 40102233: duplicated user ID detected - merged gpg: /root/.gnupg/trustdb.gpg: trustdb created gpg: key 40102233: public key "Slackware Linux Project <security@slackware.com>" imported gpg: Total number processed: 1 gpg: imported: 1 Be sure to double check the key you received. The key ID and ﬁngerprint of this particular key can be found on the Internet on many trustworthy sites. The key ID is, as mentioned above 40102233. You can get the key ﬁngerprint with the --fingerprint parameter: # gpg --fingerprint security@slackware.com pub 1024D/40102233 2003-02-26 Slackware Linux Project <security@slackware.com> Key fingerprint = EC56 49DA 401E 22AB FA67 36EF 6A44 63C0 4010 2233 sub 1024g/4E523569 2003-02-26 [expires: 2012-12-21] Once you have imported and checked this key you can start to use slackpkg, and install packages securely. Updating the package lists Before upgrading and installing packages you have to let slackpkg download the package lists from the mirror you are using. It is a good idea to do this regularly to keep these lists up to date. The latest package lists can be fetched with:$ slackpkg update

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The upgrade parameter is used to upgrade installed packages. You have to add an extra parameter to actually tell slackpkg what you want to upgrade, this differs for a stable Slackware Linux version and slackware-current. Upgrades for stable Slackware Linux releases are in the patches directory of FTP mirrors. You can update a slackware-stable installation (e.g. Slackware Linux 10.2) with:

In this case slackpkg will use the packages from the patches directory. In slackware-current updated packages are put in the normal slackware package sub-directories. So, we can pass that as an parameter to slackpkg upgrade:

You can also upgrade individual packages by specifying the name of the package to be upgraded, for example:

Installing packages
The install is used to install packages:
# slackpkg install rexima

Be aware that neither slackpkg, nor the Slackware Linux package tools do dependency checking. If some program does not work due to missing libraries, you have to add them yourself with slackpkg.

Using rsync
Another popular method of keeping Slackware Linux up to date is by keeping a local mirror. The ideal way of doing this is via rsync. rsync is a program that can synchronize two trees of ﬁles. The advantage is that rsync only transfers the differences in ﬁles, making it very fast. After syncing with a mirror you can upgrade Slackware Linux with upgradepkg, or make a new installation CD. The following example synchronizes a local current tree with an up-to-date tree from on a mirror:
# rsync -av --delete \ --exclude=slackware/kde \ --exclude=slackware/kdei \ --exclude=slackware/gnome \ --exclude=bootdisks \ --exclude=extra \ --exclude=testing \ --exclude=pasture \ --exclude=rootdisks \ --exclude=source \ --exclude=zipslack \

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rsync://fill-in-mirror/pub/slackware/slackware-current/ \ /usr/share/mirrors/slackware-current

The -a parameter implies a few other options that try to make a copy that is as exact as possible (in terms of preserving symlinks, permissions and owners). The --delete deletes ﬁles that are not available on the mirror anymore. It is good idea to use this parameter, because otherwise your tree may get bloated very quickly with older package versions. With the --exclude parameter you can specify which ﬁles or directories should be ignored. After syncing the tree you can use upgradepkg to update your Slackware Linux installation. For example:

Tagﬁles
Introduction
Tagﬁles are a relatively unknown feature of Slackware Linux. A tagﬁle is a ﬁle that can be used to instruct installpkg what packages should be installed from a collection of packages. For instance, the Slackware Linux installer generates a tagﬁle during the Expert and Menu installation methods to store which packages should be installed during the installation process. The nice aspect of tagﬁles is that you can easily create tagﬁles yourself. By writing your own tagﬁles you can automate the package installation, which is ideal for larger client or server roll-outs (or smaller set-ups if it gives you more comfort than installing packages manually). The easiest way to create your own tagﬁles is by starting out with the tagﬁles that are part of the ofﬁcial Slackware Linux distribution. In the following sections we are going to look at how this is done.

Creating tagﬁles
Tagﬁles are simple plain-text ﬁles. Each line consists of a package name and a ﬂag, these two elements are separated by a colon and a space. The ﬂag speciﬁes what should be done with a package. The ﬁelds are described in Table 18-1. Let’s look at a few lines from the tagﬁle in the “a” disk set:

It should be noted that you can also add comments to tagﬁles with the usual comment (#) character. As you can see in the snippet above there are different ﬂags. The table listed below describes the four different ﬂags.

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Chapter 18. Package Management Table 18-1. Tagﬁle ﬁelds Flag ADD SKP REC OPT Meaning A package marked by this ﬂag will automatically be installed A package marked by this ﬂag will automatically be skipped Ask the user what to do, recommend installation of the package. Ask the user what to do, the package will be described as optional.

As you can read from the table installpkg will only act automatically when either ADD or SKP is used. It would be a bit tedious to write a tagﬁle for each Slackware Linux disk set. The ofﬁcial Slackware Linux distribution contains a tagﬁle in the directory for each disk set. You can use these tagﬁles as a start. The short script listed below can be used to copy the tagﬁles to the current directory, preserving the disk set structure.
#!/bin/sh if [ ! $# -eq 1 ] ; then echo "Syntax:$0 [directory]" exit fi for i in $1/*/tagfile; do setdir=‘echo$i | egrep -o ’\w+/tagfile$’ | xargs dirname‘ mkdir$setdir cp $i$setdir done

After writing the script to a ﬁle you can execute it, and specify a slackware/ directory that provides the disk sets. For example:
$sh copy-tagfiles.sh /mnt/flux/slackware-current/slackware After doing this the current directory will contain a directory structure like this, in which you can edit the individual tag ﬁles: a/tagfile ap/tagfile d/tagfile e/tagfile [...] Using tagﬁles On an installed system you can let installpkg use a tagﬁle with the -tagfile parameter. For example: 99 Chapter 18. Package Management # installpkg -root /mnt-small -tagfile a/tagfile /mnt/flux/slackware-current/slackware/a/ Of course, tagﬁles would be useless if they cannot be used during the installation of Slackware Linux. This is certainly possible: after selecting which disk sets you want to install you can choose in what way you want to select packages (the dialog is named SELECT PROMPTING MODE. Select tagpath from this menu. You will then be asked to enter the path to the directory structure with the tagﬁles. The usual way to provide tagﬁles to the Slackware Linux installation is to put them on a ﬂoppy or another medium, and mounting this before or during the installation. E.g. you can switch to the second console with by pressing the <ALT> and <F2> keys, and create a mount point and mount the disk with the tagﬁles: # mkdir /mnt-tagfiles # mount /dev/fd0 /mnt/mnt-tagfiles After mounting the disk you can return to the virtual console on which you run setup, by pressing <ALT> and <F1>. 100 Chapter 19. Building a kernel Introduction The Linux kernel is shortly discussed in the section called What is Linux? in Chapter 2. One of the advantages of Linux is that the full sources are available (as most of the Slackware Linux system). This means that you can recompile the kernel. There are many situations in which recompiling the kernel is useful. For example: • Making the kernel leaner: One can disable certain functionality of the kernel, to decrease its size. This is especially useful in environments where memory is scarce. Optimizing the kernel: it is possible to optimize the kernel. For instance, by compiling it for a speciﬁc processor. Hardware support: Support for some hardware is not enabled by default in the Linux kernel provided by Slackware Linux. A common example is support for SMP systems. Using custom patches: There are many unofﬁcial patches for the Linux kernel. Generally speaking it is a good idea to avoid unofﬁcial patches. But some third party software, like Win4Lin (http://www.netraverse.com), require that you install an additional kernel patch. • • • This chapter focuses on the default kernel series used in Slackware Linux 10.2, Linux 2.4, though most of these instructions also apply to Linux 2.6. Compiling a kernel is not really difﬁcult, just keep around a backup kernel that you can use when something goes wrong. Kernel compilation involves these steps: • • • • • • Conﬁguring the kernel. Making dependencies. Building the kernel. Building modules. Installing the kernel and modules. Updating the LILO conﬁguration. In this chapter, we suppose that the kernel sources are available in /usr/src/linux. If you have installed the kernel sources from the “k” disk set, the kernel sources are available in /usr/src/linux-kernelversion, and /usr/src/linux is a symbolic link to the real kernel source directory. So, if you use the standards Slackware Linux kernel package you are set to go. Conﬁguration As laid out above, the ﬁrst step is to conﬁgure the kernel source. To ease the conﬁguration of the kernel, it is a good idea to copy the default Slackware Linux kernel conﬁguration to the kernel sources. The Slackware Linux kernel conﬁguration ﬁles are stored on the distribution medium as kernels/<Kernel>/config. Suppose that you use the bare.i kernel (which is the default kernel), and that you have a Slackware Linux CD-ROM mounted at /mnt/cdrom, you can copy the Slackware Linux kernel conﬁguration with: # cp /mnt/cdrom/kernels/bare.i/config /usr/src/linux/.config 101 Chapter 19. Building a kernel At this point you can start to conﬁgure the kernel. There are three conﬁguration front-ends to the kernel conﬁguration. The ﬁrst one is config, which just asks you what you want to do for each kernel option. This takes a lot of time. So, normally this is not a good way to conﬁgure the kernel. A more user friendly approach is the menuconfig front-end, which uses a menuing system that you can use to conﬁgure the kernel. There is also an X front-end, named xconfig. You can start a conﬁguration front-end by going to the kernel source directory, and executing make <front-end>. For example, to conﬁgure the kernel with the menu front-end you can use the following commands: # cd /usr/src/linux # make menuconfig In the kernel conﬁguration there are basically three options for each choice: “n” disables functionality, “y” enables functionality, and “m” compiles the functionality as a module. The default Slackware Linux kernel conﬁguration is a very good conﬁguration, it compiles only the bare functionality needed to boot the system in the kernel, the rest is compiled as a module. Whatever choices you make, you need to make sure that both the driver for your IDE/SCSI chip set is available in the kernel and the ﬁlesystem driver. If they are not, the kernel is not able to mount the root ﬁlesystem, and no further modules can be loaded. Compilation The ﬁrst step of the kernel compilation is to let the kernel build infrastructure check the dependencies. This can be done with make depend: # cd /usr/src/linux # make depend If make depend quits because there are errors, you have to recheck the kernel conﬁguration. The output of this command will usually give some clues where things went wrong. If everything went ﬁne, you can start compiling the kernel with: # make bzImage This will compile the kernel and make a compressed kernel image named bzImage in /usr/src/linux/arch/i386/boot. After compiling the kernel you have to compile the modules separately: # make modules When the module compilation is done you are ready to install the kernel and the kernel modules. 102 Chapter 19. Building a kernel Installation Installing the kernel The next step is to install the kernel and the kernel modules. We will start with installing the kernel modules, because this can be done with one command within the kernel source tree: # make modules_install This will install the modules in /lib/modules/<kernelversion>. If you are replacing a kernel with the same version number, it is a good idea to remove the old modules before installing the new ones. E.g.: # rm -rf /lib/modules/2.4.26 You can “install” the kernel by copying it to the /boot directory. You can give it any name you want, but it is a good idea to use some naming convention. E.g. vmlinuz-somename-version. For instance, if we would name it vmlinuz-custom-2.4.28, we can copy it from within the kernel source tree with: # cp arch/i386/boot/bzImage /boot/vmlinuz-custom-2.4.28 At this point you are almost ﬁnished. The last step is to add the new kernel to the Linux boot loader. Conﬁguring LILO LILO (Linux Loader) is the default boot loader that Slackware Linux uses. The conﬁguration of LILO works in two steps; the ﬁrst step is to alter the LILO conﬁguration in /etc/lilo.conf. The second step is to run the lilo, which will write the LILO conﬁguration to the boot loader. The LILO conﬁguration already has an entry for the current kernel you are running. It is a good idea to keep this entry, as a fall-back option if your new kernel does not work. If you scroll down to the bottom of /etc/lilo.conf you will see this entry, it looks comparable to this: # Linux bootable partition config begins image = /boot/vmlinuz root = /dev/hda5 label = Slack read-only # Non-UMSDOS filesystems should be mounted read-only for checking # Linux bootable partition config ends The easiest way to add the new kernel is to duplicate the existing entry, and then editing the ﬁrst entry, changing the image, and label options. After changing the example above it would look like this: # Linux bootable partition config begins image = /boot/vmlinuz-custom-2.4.28 root = /dev/hda5 label = Slack read-only # Non-UMSDOS filesystems should be mounted read-only for checking 103 Chapter 19. Building a kernel image = /boot/vmlinuz root = /dev/hda5 label = SlackOld read-only # Non-UMSDOS filesystems should be mounted read-only for checking # Linux bootable partition config ends As you can see the image points to the new kernel in the ﬁrst entry, and we changed the label of the second entry to “SlackOld”. LILO will automatically boot the ﬁrst image. You can now install this new LILO conﬁguration with the lilo command: # lilo Added Slack * Added SlackOld The next time you boot both entries will be available, and the “Slack” entry will be booted by default. Note: If you want LILO to show a menu with the entries conﬁgured via lilo.conf on each boot, make sure that you add a line that says prompt to lilo.conf. Otherwise LILO will boot the default entry that is set with default=<name>, or the ﬁrst entry when no default kernel is set. You can access the menu with entries at any time by holding the <Shift> key when LILO is started. 104 Chapter 20. System initialization This chapter describes the initialization of Slackware Linux. Along the way various conﬁguration ﬁles that are used to manipulate the initialization process are described. The bootloader Arguably the most important piece of an operating system is the kernel. The kernel manages hardware resources and software processes. The kernel is started by some tiny glue between the system BIOS (Basic Input/Output System) and the kernel, called the bootloader. The bootloader handles the complications that come with loading a speciﬁc (or less speciﬁc) kernel. Most bootloader actually work in two stages. The ﬁrst stage loader loads the second stage loader, that does the real work. The boot loader is divided in two stages on x86 machines, because the BIOS only loads one sector (the so-called boot sector) that is 512 bytes in size. Slackware Linux uses the LILO (LInux LOader) boot loader. This bootloader has been in development since 1992, and is speciﬁcally written to load the Linux kernel. Lately LILO has been replaced by the GRUB (GRand Uniﬁed Bootloader) in most GNU/Linux distributions. GRUB is available as an extra package on the Slackware Linux distribution media. LILO conﬁguration LILO is conﬁgured through the /etc/lilo.conf conﬁguration ﬁle. Slackware Linux provides an easy tool to conﬁgure LILO. This conﬁguration tool can be started with the liloconﬁg command, and is described in the installation chapter (the section called Installing Slackware Linux in Chapter 5). Manual conﬁguration of LILO is pretty simple. The LILO conﬁguration ﬁle usually starts off with some global settings: # Start LILO global section boot = /dev/sda  #compact # faster, but won’t work on all systems. prompt  timeout = 50  # Normal VGA console vga = normal   The boot option speciﬁes where the LILO bootloader should be installed. If you want to use LILO as the main bootloader for starting Linux and/or other operating systems, it is a good idea to install LILO in the MBR (Master Boot Record) of the hard disk that you use to boot the system. LILO is installed to the MBR by omitting the partition number, for instance /dev/hda or /dev/sda. If you want to install LILO to a speciﬁc partition, add a partition number, like /dev/sda1. Make sure that you have another bootloader in the MBR, or that the partition is made active using fdisk. Otherwise you may end up with an unbootable system. Be cautious if you use partitions with a XFS ﬁlesystem! Writing LILO to an XFS partition will overwrite a part of the ﬁlesystem. If you use an XFS root (/) ﬁlesystem, create a non-XFS /boot ﬁlesystem to which you install LILO, or install LILO to the MBR. 105 Chapter 20. System initialization  The prompt option will set LILO to show a boot menu. From this menu you can select which kernel or operating system should be booted. If you do not have this option enabled, you can still access the bootloader menu by holding the <Shift> key when the bootloader is started. The timeout value speciﬁes how long LILO should wait before the default kernel or OS is booted. The time is speciﬁed in tenths of a second, so in the example above LILO will wait 5 seconds before it proceeds with the boot. You can specify which video mode the kernel should use with the vga option. When this is set to normal the kernel will use the normal 80x25 text mode.   The global options are followed by sections that add Linux kernels or other operating systems. Most Linux kernel sections look like this: image = /boot/vmlinuz  root = /dev/sda5  label = Slack  read-only      The image option speciﬁes the kernel image that should be loaded for this LILO item. The root parameter is passed to the kernel, and will be used by the kernel as the root (/) ﬁlesystem. The label text is used as the label for this entry in the LILO boot menu. read-only speciﬁes that the root ﬁlesystem should be mounted read-only. The ﬁlesystem has to be mounted in read-only state to conduct a ﬁlesystem check. LILO installation LILO does not read the /etc/lilo.conf ﬁle during the second stage. So, you will have to write changes to the second stage loader when you have changed the LILO conﬁguration. This is also necessary if you install a new kernel with the same ﬁlename, since the position of the kernel on the disk may have changed. Reinstalling LILO can simply be done with the lilo command: # lilo Added Slack26 * Added Slack init After the kernel is loaded and started, the kernel will start the init command. init is the parent of all processes, and takes care of starting the system initialization scripts, and spawning login consoles through agetty. The behavior of init is conﬁgured in /etc/inittab. The /etc/inittab ﬁle is documented fairly well. It speciﬁes what scripts the system should run for different runlevels. A runlevel is a state the system is running in. For instance, runlevel 1 is single user mode, and runlevel 3 is multi-user mode. We will have a short look at a line from /etc/inittab to see how it works: 106 Chapter 20. System initialization rc:2345:wait:/etc/rc.d/rc.M This line speciﬁes that /etc/rc.d/rc.M should be started when the system switches to runlevel 2, 3, 4 or 5. The only line you probably ever have to touch is the default runlevel: id:3:initdefault: In this example the default runlevel is set to 3 (multiuser mode). You can set this to another runlevel by replacing 3 with the new default runlevel. Runlevel 4 can particularly be interesting on desktop machines, since Slackware Linux will try to start the GDM, KDM or XDM display manager (in this particular order). These display managers provide a graphical login, and are respectively part of GNOME, KDE and X11. Another interesting section are the lines that specify what command should handle a console. For instance: c1:1235:respawn:/sbin/agetty 38400 tty1 linux This line speciﬁes that agetty should be started on tty1 (the ﬁrst virtual terminal) in runlevels 1, 2, 3 and 5. The agetty command opens the tty port, and prompts for a login name. agetty will then spawn login to handle the login. As you can see from the entries, Slackware Linux only starts one console in runlevel 6, namely tty6. One might ask what happened to tty0, tty0 certainly exists, and represents the active console. Since /etc/inittab is the right place to spawn agetty instances to listen for logins, you can also let one or more agetties listen to a serial port. This is especially handy when you have one or more terminals connected to a machine. You can add something like the following line to start an agetty instance that listens on COM1: s1:12345:respawn:/sbin/agetty -L ttyS0 9600 vt100 Initialization scripts As explained in the init (the section called init) section, init starts some scripts that handle different runlevels. These scripts perform jobs and change settings that are necessary for a particular runlevel, but they may also start other scripts. Let’s look at an example from /etc/rc.d/rc.M, the script that init executes when the system switches to a multi-user runlevel: # Start the sendmail daemon: if [ -x /etc/rc.d/rc.sendmail ]; then . /etc/rc.d/rc.sendmail start fi These lines say “execute /etc/rc.d/rc.sendmail start if /etc/rc.d/rc.sendmail is executable”. This indicates the simplicity of the Slackware Linux initialization scripts. Different functionality, for instance network services, can be turned on or off, by twiddling the executable ﬂag on their initialization script. If the initialization script is executable, the service will be started, otherwise it will not. Setting ﬁle ﬂags is described in the section called chmod in Chapter 8, but we will have a look at a quick example how you can enable and disable sendmail. 107 Chapter 20. System initialization To start sendmail when the system initializes, execute: # chmod +x /etc/rc.d/rc.sendmail To disable starting of sendmail when the system initializes, execute: # chmod -x /etc/rc.d/rc.sendmail Most service-speciﬁc initialization scripts accept three parameters to change the state of the service: start, restart and stop. These parameters are pretty much self descriptive. For example, if you would like to restart sendmail, you could execute: # /etc/rc.d/rc.sendmail restart If the script is not executable, you have to tell the shell that you would like to execute the ﬁle with sh. For example: # sh /etc/rc.d/rc.sendmail start Hotplugging Slackware Linux has supported hotplugging since Slackware Linux 9.1. When enabled, the kernel passes notiﬁcations about device events to the hotplug command. If a device was added to the system, the hotplugging system will look whether there are any module mappings for the device. If there are, the appropriate device driver module for the device is automatically loaded. Hotplug will remove the module when the device is removed. The hotplugging system is initialized in /etc/rc.d/rc.M by executing /etc/rc.d/rc.hotplug start. As with most functionality, you can enable or disable hotplugging by twiddling the executable ﬂag of the /etc/rc.d/rc.hotplug script (see the section called Initialization scripts). If hotplug automatically loads modules that you do not want to load, you can add them to the /etc/hotplug/blacklist ﬁle. This ﬁle lists modules that should never be loaded by the hotplugging system, module entries are line separated. Executing scripts on hotplug events One of the useful aspects of the hotplug scripts is that you can execute scripts when a device is added or removed. When a device event occurs, hotplug will execute all scripts with the .hotplug sufﬁx in /etc/hotplug.d/<class>/, in which <class> denotes the class in which the device is in that caused the event. There most important classes are: Table 20-1. Hotplug device classes Preﬁx default ieee1394 Description Scripts for this device class are started after any hotplug event. IEEE1394/Firewire devices. 108 Chapter 20. System initialization Preﬁx input net pci scsi usb Description Input devices like keyboards and mice. Network devices. Network devices will also trigger bus-speciﬁc hotplug events. Devices on the PCI bus. SCSI disks, CD-ROM and tape devices. Devices that use the USB bus. Besides the device class, there is something some other convention that is worth observing: it is best to add a number and a dash as a preﬁx to the script, because this will allow you to order the priority of the scripts. For example, 10-dosomething.hotplug will be executed before 20-dosomething.hotplug. Note: There is black no magic going on with the priority of the script :^). /sbin/hotplug uses a wildcard to loop through the scripts, and 10 matches earlier than 20: for I in "${DIR}/$1/"*.hotplug "${DIR}/"default/*.hotplug ; do

Hopefully this will give some taste of the power of shell scripting.

Now, let’s look at an example stub script, that does nothing besides outputting debug messages:
#!/bin/sh cd /etc/hotplug . ./hotplug.functions DEBUG=yes export DEBUG debug_mesg "arguments ($*) env (‘env‘)" case$ACTION in add|register) # Stub ;; remove|unregister) # Stub ;; esac

By default, the hotplug scripts log at the notice level. The standard syslog conﬁguration on Slackware Linux does not log this. To debug hotplugging scripts, it is best to change the logging level. You can do this by replacing the following line in /etc/hotplug/hotplug.functions:
$LOGGER -t$(basename $0)"[$$]" "@" to: LOGGER -p user.info -t (basename 0)"[$$]" "$@"

109

Chapter 20. System initialization After this change hotplug debug messages will be visible in /var/log/messages. As you can see the script makes use of the $ACTION variable to see what kind of hotplug action took place. Let’s take a look at an example action when this script is used for handling USB events, and named 10-stub.hotplug: Jul 19 16:13:23 mindbender 10-stub.hotplug[18970]: arguments (usb) env (SUBSYSTEM=usb OLDPWD=/ DEVPATH=/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:10.0/usb2/2-1/2-1.3/2-1.3:1.2 PATH=/bin:/sbin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin ACTION=add PWD=/etc/hotplug HOME=/ SHLVL=2 DEVICE=/proc/bus/usb/002/009 PHYSDEVDRIVER=snd-usb-audio INTERFACE=1/2/0 PRODUCT=d8d/651/1 TYPE=0/0/0 DEBUG=yes PHYSDEVBUS=usb SEQNUM=1528 _=/usr/bin/env) That is nice, when I plugged an USB device, the script gets loaded (a couple of times, this is just one of the interesting bits). Actually, this is my USB Phone, which is represented as an USB audio device under GNU/Linux. The problem with USB audio devices is that the device volumes that are saved with alsactl store are not automatically set when the device is plugged. But right know we can easily execute alsactl restore when the device is plugged. Please note that the script gets very useful information through some environment variables. To solve the volume problem, we can create a script, say /etc/hotplug.d/usb/50-usb-audio-volume.hotplug, that looks like this: #!/bin/sh cd /etc/hotplug . ./hotplug.functions # DEBUG=yes export DEBUG debug_mesg "arguments ($*) env (‘env‘)" case $ACTION in add|register) if [$PHYSDEVDRIVER = "snd-usb-audio" ]; then /usr/sbin/alsactl restore fi ;; remove|unregister) ;; *) debug_mesg "Unknown action ’$ACTION’" ;; esac Based on the environment variables this script can be reﬁned to restrict running alsactl for speciﬁc USB audio devices. 110 Chapter 21. Security Introduction With the increasing usage of the Internet and wireless networks security is getting more important every day. It is impossible to cover this subject in a single chapter of an introduction to GNU/Linux. This chapter covers some basic security techniques that provide a good start for desktop and server security. Before we go on to speciﬁc subjects, it is a good idea to make some remarks about passwords. Computer authorization largely relies on passwords. Be sure to use good passwords in all situations. Avoid using words, names, birth dates and short passwords. These passwords can easily be cracked with dictionary attacks or brute force attacks against hosts or password hashes. Use long passwords, ideally eight characters or longer, consisting of random letters (including capitals) and numbers. Closing services Introduction Many GNU/Linux run some services that are open to a local network or the Internet. Other hosts can connect to these services by connecting to speciﬁc ports. For example, port 80 is used for WWW trafﬁc. The /etc/services ﬁle contains a table with all commonly used services, and the port numbers that are used for these services. A secure system should only run the services that are necessary. So, suppose that a host is acting as a web server, it should not have ports open (thus servicing) FTP or SMTP. With more open ports security risks increase very fast, because there is a bigger chance that the software servicing a port has a vulnerability, or is badly conﬁgured. The following few sections will help you tracking down which ports are open, and closing them. Finding open ports Open ports can be found using a port scanner. Probably the most famous port scanner for GNU/Linux is nmap. nmap is available through the “n” disk set. The basic nmap syntax is: nmap host. The host parameter can either be a hostname or IP address. Suppose that we would like to scan the host that nmap is installed on. In this case we could specify the localhost IP address, 127.0.0.1:$ nmap 127.0.0.1 Starting nmap V. 3.00 ( www.insecure.org/nmap/ ) Interesting ports on localhost (127.0.0.1): (The 1596 ports scanned but not shown below are in state: closed) Port State Service 21/tcp open ftp 22/tcp open ssh 23/tcp open telnet 80/tcp open http

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Chapter 21. Security
6000/tcp open X11

Nmap run completed -- 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 0 seconds

In this example you can see that the host has ﬁve open ports that are being serviced; ftp, ssh, telnet, http and X11.

inetd
There are two ways to offer TCP/IP services: by running server applications stand-alone as a daemon or by using the internet super server, inetd(8). inetd is a daemon which monitors a range of ports. If a client attempts to connect to a port inetd handles the connection and forwards the connection to the server software which handles that kind of connection. The advantage of this approach is that it adds an extra layer of security and it makes it easier to log incoming connections. The disadvantage is that it is somewhat slower than using a stand-alone daemon. It is thus a good idea to run a stand-alone daemon on, for example, a heavily loaded FTP server. You can check whether inetd is running on a host or not with ps, for example:
$ps ax | grep inetd 2845 ? S 0:00 /usr/sbin/inetd In this example inetd is running with PID (process ID) 2845. inetd can be conﬁgured using the /etc/inetd.conf ﬁle. Let’s have a look at an example line from inetd.conf: # File Transfer Protocol (FTP) server: ftp stream tcp nowait root /usr/sbin/tcpd proftpd This line speciﬁes that inetd should accept FTP connections and pass them to tcpd. This may seem a bit odd, because proftpd normally handles FTP connections. You can also specify to use proftpd directly in inetd.conf, but it is a good idea to give the connection to tcpd. This program passes the connection to proftpd in turn, as speciﬁed. tcpd is used to monitor services and to provide host based access control. Services can be disabled by adding the comment character (#) at the beginning of the line. It is a good idea to disable all services and enable services you need one at a time. After changing /etc/inetd.conf inetd needs to be restarted to activate the changes. This can be done by sending the HUP signal to the inetd process: # ps ax | grep ’inetd’ 2845 ? S # kill -HUP 2845 0:00 /usr/sbin/inetd If you do not need inetd at all, it is a good idea to remove it. If you want to keep it installed, but do not want Slackware Linux to load it at the booting process, execute the following command as root: # chmod a-x /etc/rc.d/rc.inetd 112 Chapter 22. Miscellaneous Scheduling tasks with cron Slackware Linux includes an implementation of the classic UNIX cron daemon that allows users to schedule tasks for execution at regular intervals. Each user can create, remove, or modify an individual crontab ﬁle. This crontab ﬁle speciﬁes commands or scripts to be run at speciﬁed time intervals. Blank lines in the crontab or lines that begin with a hash (“#”) are ignored. Each entry in the crontab ﬁle must contain 6 ﬁelds separated by spaces. These ﬁelds are minute, hour, day, month, day of week, and command. Each of the ﬁrst ﬁve ﬁelds may contain a time or the “*” wildcard to match all times for that ﬁeld. For example, to have the date command run every day at 6:10 AM, the following entry could be used. 10 6 * * * date A user crontab may be viewed with the crontab -l command. For a deeper introduction to the syntax of a crontab ﬁle, let us examine the default root crontab. # crontab -l # If you don’t want the output of a cron job mailed to you, you have to direct # any output to /dev/null. We’ll do this here since these jobs should run # properly on a newly installed system, but if they don’t the average newbie # might get quite perplexed about getting strange mail every 5 minutes. :^) # # Run the hourly, daily, weekly, and monthly cron jobs. # Jobs that need different timing may be entered into the crontab as before, # but most really don’t need greater granularity than this. If the exact # times of the hourly, daily, weekly, and monthly cron jobs do not suit your # needs, feel free to adjust them. # # Run hourly cron jobs at 47 minutes after the hour: 47 * * * * /usr/bin/run-parts /etc/cron.hourly 1> /dev/null # # Run daily cron jobs at 4:40 every day: 40 4 * * * /usr/bin/run-parts /etc/cron.daily 1> /dev/null # # Run weekly cron jobs at 4:30 on the first day of the week: 30 4 * * 0 /usr/bin/run-parts /etc/cron.weekly 1> /dev/null # # Run monthly cron jobs at 4:20 on the first day of the month: 20 4 1 * * /usr/bin/run-parts /etc/cron.monthly 1> /dev/null       The ﬁrst ﬁeld, 47, speciﬁes that this job should occur at 47 minutes after the hour. The second ﬁeld, *, is a wildcard, so this job should occur every hour. The third ﬁeld, *, is a wildcard, so this job should occur every day. The fourth ﬁeld, *, is a wildcard, so this job should occur every month. The ﬁfth ﬁeld, *, is a wildcard, so this job should occur every day of the week. The sixth ﬁeld, /usr/bin/run-parts /etc/cron.hourly 1> /dev/null, speciﬁes the command that should be run at the time speciﬁcation deﬁned in the ﬁrst ﬁve ﬁelds. 113 Chapter 22. Miscellaneous The default root crontab is setup to run scripts in /etc/cron.monthly on a monthly basis, the scripts in /etc/cron.weekly on a weekly basis, the scripts in /etc/cron.daily on a daily basis, and the scripts in /etc/cron.hourly on an hourly basis. For this reason it is not strictly necessary for an administrator to understand the inner workings of cron at all. With Slackware Linux, you can simply add a new script to one of the above directories to schedule a new periodic task. Indeed, perusing those directories will give you a good idea of the work that Slackware Linux does behind the scenes on a regular basis to keep things like the slocate database updated. Hard disk parameters Many modern disks offer various features for increasing disk performance and improving integrity. Many of these features can be tuned with the hdparm command. Be careful with changing disk settings with this utility, because some changes can damage data on your disk. You can get an overview of the active settings for a disk by providing the device node of a disk as a parameter to hdparm: # hdparm /dev/hda /dev/hda: multcount IO_support unmaskirq using_dma keepsettings readonly readahead geometry = 0 (off) = 1 (32-bit) = 1 (on) = 1 (on) = 0 (off) = 0 (off) = 256 (on) = 65535/16/63, sectors = 78165360, start = 0 A common cause for bad disk performance is that DMA was not automatically used by the kernel for a disk. DMA will speed up I/O throughput and ofﬂoad CPU usage, by making it possible for the disk to directly transfer data from the disk to the system memory. If DMA is turned off, the overview of settings would shows this line: using_dma = 0 (off) You can easily turn on DMA for this disk with the -d parameter of hdparm: # hdparm -d 1 /dev/hda /dev/hda: setting using_dma to 1 (on) using_dma = 1 (on) You can do this during every boot by adding the hdparm command to /etc/rc.d/rc.local. The -i parameter of hdparm is also very useful, because it gives detailed information about a disk: # hdparm -i /dev/hda /dev/hda: Model=WDC WD400EB-00CPF0, FwRev=06.04G06, SerialNo=WD-WCAAT6022342 114 Chapter 22. Miscellaneous Config={ HardSect NotMFM HdSw>15uSec SpinMotCtl Fixed DTR>5Mbs FmtGapReq } RawCHS=16383/16/63, TrkSize=57600, SectSize=600, ECCbytes=40 BuffType=DualPortCache, BuffSize=2048kB, MaxMultSect=16, MultSect=off CurCHS=16383/16/63, CurSects=16514064, LBA=yes, LBAsects=78163247 IORDY=on/off, tPIO={min:120,w/IORDY:120}, tDMA={min:120,rec:120} PIO modes: pio0 pio1 pio2 pio3 pio4 DMA modes: mdma0 mdma1 mdma2 UDMA modes: udma0 udma1 udma2 udma3 udma4 *udma5 AdvancedPM=no WriteCache=enabled Drive conforms to: device does not report version: * signifies the current active mode Monitoring memory usage In some situations it is handy to diagnose information about how memory is used. For example, on a badly performing server you may want to look whether RAM shortage is causing the system to swap pages, or maybe you are setting up a network service, and want to ﬁnd the optimum caching parameters. Slackware Linux provides some tools that help you analyse how memory is used. vmstat vmstat is a command that can provide statistics about various parts of the virtual memory system. Without any extra parameters vmstat provides a summary of some relevant statistics: # vmstat procs -----------memory---------- ---swap-- -----io---- --system-- ----cpu---r b swpd free buff cache si so bi bo in cs us sy id wa 0 0 0 286804 7912 98632 0 0 198 9 1189 783 5 1 93 1 Since we are only looking at memory usage in this section, we will only have a look at the memory and swap ﬁelds. • • • • • • swpd: The amount of virtual memory being used. free: The amount of memory that is not used at the moment. buff : The amount of memory used as buffers. cache: The amount of memory used as cached. si: The amount of memory that is swapped in from disk per second. si: The amount of memory that is swapped to disk per second. It is often useful to see how memory usage changes over time. You can add an interval as a parameter to vmstat, to run vmstat continuously, printing the current statistics. This interval is in seconds. So, if you want to get updated statistics every second, you can execute: # vmstat 1 procs -----------memory---------- ---swap-- -----io---- --system-- ----cpu---r b swpd free buff cache si so bi bo in cs us sy id wa 2 0 0 315132 8832 99324 0 0 189 10 1185 767 5 1 93 1 115 Chapter 22. Miscellaneous 1 0 0 0 [...] 0 304812 0 299948 8832 8836 99324 99312 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1222 0 1171 6881 24 1824 41 8 68 9 49 0 0 Additionally, you can tell vmstat how many times it should output these statistics (rather than doing this inﬁnitely). For example, if you would like to print these statistics every two seconds, and ﬁve times in total, you could execute vmstat in the following manner: # vmstat 2 5 procs -----------memory---------- ---swap-- -----io---- --system-- ----cpu---r b swpd free buff cache si so bi bo in cs us sy id wa 2 0 0 300996 9172 99360 0 0 186 10 1184 756 5 1 93 1 0 1 0 299012 9848 99368 0 0 336 0 1293 8167 20 8 21 51 1 0 0 294788 11976 99368 0 0 1054 0 1341 12749 14 11 0 76 2 0 0 289996 13916 99368 0 0 960 176 1320 17636 22 14 0 64 2 0 0 284620 16112 99368 0 0 1086 426 1351 21217 25 18 0 58 116 VI. Network administration Chapter 23. Networking conﬁguration Hardware Network cards (NICs) Drivers for NICs are installed as kernel modules. The module for your NIC has to be loaded during the initialization of Slackware Linux. On most systems the NIC is automatically detected and conﬁgured during the installation of Slackware Linux. You can reconﬁgure your NIC with the netconﬁg command. netconﬁg adds the driver (module) for the detected card to /etc/rc.d/rc.netdevice. It is also possible to manually conﬁgure which modules should be loaded during the initialization of the system. This can be done by adding a modprobe line to /etc/rc.d/rc.modules. For example, if you want to load the module for 3Com 59x NICs (3c59x.o), add the following line to /etc/rc.d/rc.modules /sbin/modprobe 3c59x PCMCIA cards Supported PCMCIA cards are detected automatically by the PCMCIA software. The pcmcia-cs packages from the “a” disk set provides PCMCIA functionality for Slackware Linux. Conﬁguration of interfaces Network cards are available under Linux through so-called “interfaces”. The ifconﬁg(8) command can be used to display the available interfaces: # ifconfig -a eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:20:AF:F6:D4:AD inet addr:192.168.1.1 Bcast:192.168.1.255 Mask:255.255.255.0 UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1 RX packets:1301 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:1529 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:1 txqueuelen:100 RX bytes:472116 (461.0 Kb) TX bytes:280355 (273.7 Kb) Interrupt:10 Base address:0xdc00 lo Link encap:Local Loopback inet addr:127.0.0.1 Mask:255.0.0.0 UP LOOPBACK RUNNING MTU:16436 Metric:1 RX packets:77 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:77 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:0 RX bytes:8482 (8.2 Kb) TX bytes:8482 (8.2 Kb) Network cards get the name ethn, in which n is a number, starting with 0. In the example above, the ﬁrst network card (eth0) already has an IP address. But unconﬁgured interfaces have no IP address, the ifconﬁg will not show IP addresses for unconﬁgured interfaces. Interfaces can be conﬁgured in 118 Chapter 23. Networking conﬁguration the /etc/rc.d/rc.inet1.conf ﬁle. You can simply read the comments, and ﬁll in the required information. For example: # Config information for eth0: IPADDR[0]="192.168.1.1" NETMASK[0]="255.255.255.0" USE_DHCP[0]="" DHCP_HOSTNAME[0]="" In this example the IP address 192.168.1.1 with the 255.255.255.0 netmask is assigned to the ﬁrst ethernet interface (eth0). If you are using a DHCP server you can change the USE_DHCP="" line to USE_DHP[n]="yes" (swap “n” with the interface number). Other variables, except DHCP_HOSTNAME are ignored when using DHCP. For example: IPADDR[1]="" NETMASK[1]="" USE_DHCP[1]="yes" DHCP_HOSTNAME[1]="" The same applies to other interfaces. You can activate the settings by rebooting the system or by executing /etc/rc.d/rc.inet1. It is also possible to reconﬁgure only one interface with /etc/rc.d/rc.inet1 ethX_restart, in which ethX should be replaced by the name of the interface that you would like to reconﬁgure. Conﬁguration of interfaces (IPv6) Introduction IPv6 is the next generation internet protocol. One of the advantages is that it has a much larger address space. In IPv4 (the internet protocol that is commonly used today) addresses are 32-bit, this address space is almost completely used right now, and there is a lack of IPv4 addresses. IPv6 uses 128-bit addresses, which provides an unimaginable huge address space (2^128 addresses). IPv6 uses another address notation, ﬁrst of all hex numbers are used instead of decimal numbers, and the address is noted in pairs of 16-bits, separated by a colon (“:”). Let’s have a look at an example address: fec0:ffff:a300:2312:0:0:0:1 A block of zeroes can be replaced by two colons (“::”). Thus, thee address above can be written as: fec0:ffff:a300:2312::1 Each IPv6 address has a preﬁx. Normally this consists of two elements: 32 bits identifying the address space the provider provides you, and a 16-bit number that speciﬁes the network. These two elements form the preﬁx, and in this case the preﬁxlength is 32 + 16 = 48 bits. Thus, if you have a /48 preﬁx you can make 2^16 subnets and have 2^80 hosts on each subnet. The image below shows the structure of an IPv6 address with a 48-bit preﬁx. 119 Chapter 23. Networking conﬁguration Figure 23-1. The anatomy of an IPv6 address There are a some specially reserved preﬁxes, most notable include: Table 23-1. Important IPv6 Preﬁxes Preﬁx fe80:: fec0:: 2002:: Description Link local addresses, which are not routed. Site local addresses, which are locally routed, but not on or to the internet. 6to4 addresses, which are used for the transition from IPv4 to IPv6. Slackware Linux IPv6 support The Linux kernel binaries included in Slackware Linux do not support IPv6 by default, but support is included as a kernel module. This module can be loaded using modprobe: # modprobe ipv6 You can verify if IPv6 support is loaded correctly by looking at the kernel output using the dmesg:$ dmesg [..] IPv6 v0.8 for NET4.0

IPv6 support can be enabled permanently by adding the following line to /etc/rc.d/rc.modules:
/sbin/modprobe ipv6

Interfaces can be conﬁgured using ifconﬁg. But it is recommended to make IPv6 settings using the ip command, which is part of the “iputils” package that can be found in the extra/ directory of the Slackware Linux tree.

If there are any router advertisers on a network there is a chance that the interfaces on that network already received an IPv6 address when the IPv6 kernel support was loaded. If this is not the case an IPv6 address can be added to an interface using the ip utility. Suppose we want to add the address “fec0:0:0:bebe::1” with a preﬁx length of 64 (meaning “fec0:0:0:bebe” is the preﬁx). This can be done with the following command syntax:

For example:

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Wireless interfaces
Wireless interfaces usually require some additional conﬁguration, like setting the ESSID, WEP keys and the wireless mode. Interface settings that are speciﬁc to wireless interfaces can be set in the /etc/rc.d/rc.wireless.conf ﬁle. The /etc/rc.d/rc.wireless script conﬁgures wireless interfaces based on descriptions from /etc/rc.d/rc.wireless.conf. In rc.wireless.conf settings are made per interface MAC address. By default this ﬁle has a section that matches any interface:
## NOTE : Comment out the following five lines to activate the samples below ... ## --------- START SECTION TO REMOVE ----------## Pick up any Access Point, should work on most 802.11 cards *) INFO="Any ESSID" ESSID="any" ;; ## ---------- END SECTION TO REMOVE ------------

It is generally a good idea to remove this section to make per-card settings. If you are lazy and only have one wireless card, you can leave this section in and add any conﬁguration parameters you need. Since this section matches any wireless interface the wireless card you have will be matched and conﬁgured. You can now add a sections for your wireless interfaces. Each section has the following format:

You can ﬁnd the MAC address of an interface by looking at the ifconﬁg output for the interface. For example, if a wireless card has the eth1 interface name, you can ﬁnd the MAC address the following way:
# ifconfig eth1 eth1 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:01:F4:EC:A5:32 inet addr:192.168.2.2 Bcast:192.168.2.255 Mask:255.255.255.0 UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1 RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:4 errors:1 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 RX bytes:0 (0.0 b) TX bytes:504 (504.0 b) Interrupt:5 Base address:0x100

The hexadecimal address that is printed after HWaddr is the MAC address, in this case 00:01:F4:EC:A5:32. When you have found the MAC address of the interface you can add a section for the device to /etc/rc.d/rc.wireless.conf. For example:
00:01:F4:EC:A5:32) INFO="Cabletron Roamabout WLAN NIC" ESSID="home" CHANNEL="8" MODE="Managed" KEY="1234-5678-AB" ;;

This will set the interface with MAC address 00:01:F4:EC:A5:32 to use the ESSID home, work in Managed mode on channel 8. The key used for WEP encryption is 1234-5678-AB. There are many

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Chapter 23. Networking conﬁguration other parameters that can be set. For an overview of all parameters, refer to the last example in rc.wireless.conf. After conﬁguring a wireless interface, you can activate the changes by executing the network initialization script /etc/rc.d/rc.inet1. You can see the current wireless settings with the iwconﬁg command:
eth1 IEEE 802.11-DS ESSID:"home" Nickname:"HERMES I" Mode:Managed Frequency:2.447 GHz Access Point: 02:20:6B:75:0C:56 Bit Rate:2 Mb/s Tx-Power=15 dBm Sensitivity:1/3 Retry limit:4 RTS thr:off Fragment thr:off Encryption key:1234-5678-AB Power Management:off Link Quality=0/92 Signal level=134/153 Noise level=134/153 Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0 Tx excessive retries:27 Invalid misc:0 Missed beacon:0

Resolving Hostname
Each computer on the internet has a hostname. If you do not have a hostname that is resolvable with DNS, it is still a good idea to conﬁgure your hostname, because some software uses it. You can conﬁgure the hostname in /etc/HOSTNAME. A single line with the hostname of the machine will sufﬁce. Normally a hostname has the following form: host.domain.tld, for example darkstar.slackfans.org. Be aware that the hostname has to be resolvable, meaning that GNU/Linux should be able to convert the hostname to an IP address. You can make sure the hostname is resolvable by adding it to /etc/hosts. Read the following section for more information about this ﬁle.

/etc/hosts
/etc/hosts is a table of IP addresses with associated hostnames. This ﬁle can be used to name computers in a small network. Let’s look at an example of the /etc/hosts ﬁle: 127.0.0.1 192.168.1.1 192.168.1.169 localhost tazzy.slackfans.org tazzy flux.slackfans.org

The localhost line should always be present. It assigns the name localhost to a special interface, the loopback. In this example the names tazzy.slackfans.org and tazzy are assigned to the IP address 192.168.1.1, and the name ﬂux.slackfans.org is assigned to the IP address 192.168.1.169. On the system with this ﬁle both computers are available via the mentioned hostnames. It is also possible to add IPv6 addresses, which will be used if your system is conﬁgured for IPv6. This is an example of a /etc/hosts ﬁle with IPv4 and IPv6 entries:
# IPv4 entries 127.0.0.1 192.168.1.1 192.168.1.169

localhost tazzy.slackfans.org tazzy gideon.slackfans.org

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# IPv6 entries ::1 localhost fec0:0:0:bebe::2 flux.slackfans.org

Please note that “::1” is the default IPv6 loopback.

/etc/resolv.conf
The /etc/resolv.conf ﬁle is used to specify which nameservers the system should use. A nameserver converts hostnames to IP addresses. Your provider should have given you at least two name name server addresses (DNS servers). You can add these nameservers to /etc/resolv.conf by adding the line nameserver ipaddress for each nameserver. For example:
nameserver 192.168.1.1 nameserver 192.168.1.169

You can check wether the hostnames are tranlated correctly or not with the host hostname command. Swap hostname with an existing hostname, for example the website of your internet service provider.

IPv4 Forwarding
IPv4 forwarding connects two or more networks by sending packets which arrive on one interface to another interface. This makes it possible to let a GNU/Linux machine act as a router. For example, you can connect multiple networks, or your home network with the internet. Let’s have a look at an example: Figure 23-2. Router example

In dit example there are two networks, 192.168.1.0 and 192.168.2.0. Three hosts are connected to both network. One of these hosts is connected to both networks with interfaces. The interface on the 192.168.1.0 network has IP address 192.168.1.3, the interface on the 192.168.2.0 network has IP address 192.168.2.3. If the host acts as a router between both networks it forwards packets from the 192.168.1.0 network to the 192.168.2.0 network and vise versa. Routing of normal IPv4 TCP/IP packages can be enabled by enabling IPv4 forwarding.

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Chapter 23. Networking conﬁguration IPv4 forwarding can be enabled or disabled under Slackware Linux by changing the executable bit of the /etc/rc.d/rc.ip_forward ﬁle. If the executable bit is set on this ﬁle, IP forwarding will be enabled during the system boot, otherwise it will not. You can check whether the executable bit is enabled with ls -l (a description of the ls command can be found in the section called ls in Chapter 8). It is also possible to enable IPv4 forwarding on a running system with the following command (0 disables forwarding, 1 enables forwarding):
# echo 0 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward

Be cautious! By default there are no active packet ﬁlters. This means that anyone can access other networks. Trafﬁc can be ﬁltered and logged with the iptables kernel packet ﬁlter. Iptables can be administrated through the iptables command. NAT (Network Address Translation) is also a subset of iptables, and can be controlled and enabled through the iptables command. NAT makes it possible to “hide” a network behind one IP address. This allows you to use the internet on a complete network with only one IP address.

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Chapter 24. IPsec
Theory
IPsec is a standard for securing IP communication through authentication, and encryption. Besides that it can compress packets, reducing trafﬁc. The following protocols are part of the IPsec standard:
•

AH (Authentication Header) provides authenticity guarantee for transported packets. This is done by checksumming the packages using a cryptographic algorithm. If the checksum is found to be correct by the receiver, the receiver can be assured that the packet is not modiﬁed, and that the packet really originated from the reported sender (provided that the keys are only known by the sender and receiver). ESP (Encapsulating Security Payload) is used to encrypt packets. This makes the data of the packet conﬁdent, and only readable by the host with the right decryption key. IPcomp (IP payload compression) provides compression before a packet is encrypted. This is useful, because encrypted data generally compresses worse than unencrypted data. IKE (Internet Key Exchange) provides the means to negotiate keys in secrecy. Please note that IKE is optional, keys can be conﬁgured manually.

•

•

•

There are actually two modes of operation: transport mode is used to encrypt normal connections between two hosts, tunnel mode encapsulates the original package in a new header. In this chapter we are going to look at the transport mode, because the primary goal of this chapter is to show how to set up a secure connection between two hosts. There are also two major methods of authentication. You can use manual keys, or an Internet Key Exchange (IKE) daemon, like racoon, that automatically exchanges keys securely betwoon two hosts. In both cases you need to set up a policy in the Security Policy Database (SPD). This database is used by the kernel to decide what kind of security policy is needed to communicate with another host. If you use manual keying you also have to set up Security Association Database (SAD) entries, which speciﬁes what encryption algorithmn and key should be used for secure communication with another host. If you use an IKE daemon the security associations are automatically established.

Kernel conﬁguration
Native IPsec support is only available in Linux 2.6.x kernels. Earlier kernels have no native IPsec support. So, make sure that you have a 2.6.x kernel. The 2.6 kernel is available in Slackware Linux 10.0, 10.1, and 10.2 from the testing directory on CD2 of the Slackware Linux CD sets, or any of the ofﬁcial Slackware Linux mirrors. The default Slackware Linux 2.6 kernel has support for AH, ESP and IPcomp in for both IPv4 and IPv6. If you are compiling a custom kernel enable use at least the following options in your kernel conﬁguration:
CONFIG_INET_AH=y CONFIG_INET_ESP=y CONFIG_INET_IPCOMP=y

Or you can compile support for IPsec protocols as a module:
CONFIG_INET_AH=m

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CONFIG_INET_ESP=m CONFIG_INET_IPCOMP=m

In this chapter we are only going to use AH and ESP transformations, but it is not a bad idea to enable IPComp transformation for further conﬁguration of IPsec. When you choose to compile IPsec support as a module, make sure that the required modules are loaded. For example, if you are going to use ESP for IPv4 connections, load the esp4 module. Compile the kernel as usual and boot it.

Installing IPsec-Tools
The next step is to install the IPsec-Tools (http://ipsec-tools.sourceforge.net). These tools are ports of the KAME (http://www.kame.net) IPsec utilities. Download the latest sources and unpack, conﬁgure and install them:
# tar jxf ipsec-tools-x.y.z.tar.bz2 # cd ipsec-tools-x.y.z # CFLAGS="-O2 -march=i486 -mcpu=i686" \ ./configure --prefix=/usr \ --sysconfdir=/etc \ --localstatedir=/var \ --enable-hybrid \ --enable-natt \ --enable-dpd \ --enable-frag \ i486-slackware-linux # make # make install

Replace x.y.z with the version of the downloaded sources. The most notable ﬂags that we specify during the conﬁguration of the sources are:
•

--enable-dpd: enables dead peer detection (DPD). DPD is a method for detecting wether any of the hosts for which security associations are set up is unreachable. When this is the case the security associations to that host can be removed. --enable-natt: enables NAT traversal (NAT-T). Since NAT alters the IP headers, this causes problems for guaranteeing authenticity of a packet. NAT-T is a method that helps overcoming this problem. Conﬁguring NAT-T is beyond the scope of this article.

•

Setting up IPsec with manual keying
Introduction
We will use an example as the guideline for setting up an encrypted connection between to hosts. The hosts have the IP addresses 192.168.1.1 and 192.168.1.169. The “transport mode” of operation will be used with AH and ESP transformations and manual keys.

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Writing the conﬁguration ﬁle
The ﬁrst step is to write a conﬁguration ﬁle we will name /etc/setkey.conf. On the ﬁrst host (192.168.1.1) the following /etc/setkey.conf conﬁguration will be used:
#!/usr/sbin/setkey -f # Flush the SAD and SPD flush; spdflush; add 192.168.1.1 192.168.1.169 ah 0x200 -A hmac-md5 0xa731649644c5dee92cbd9c2e7e188ee6; add 192.168.1.169 192.168.1.1 ah 0x300 -A hmac-md5 0x27f6d123d7077b361662fc6e451f65d8; add 192.168.1.1 192.168.1.169 esp 0x201 -E 3des-cbc 0x656c8523255ccc23a66c1917aa0cf30991fce83532a4b224; add 192.168.1.169 192.168.1.1 esp 0x301 -E 3des-cbc 0xc966199f24d095f3990a320d749056401e82b26570320292 spdadd 192.168.1.1 192.168.1.169 any -P out ipsec esp/transport//require ah/transport//require; spdadd 192.168.1.169 192.168.1.1 any -P in ipsec esp/transport//require ah/transport//require;

The ﬁrst line (a line ends with a “;”) adds a key for the header checksumming for packets coming from 192.168.1.1 going to 192.168.1.169. The second line does the same for packets coming from 192.168.1.169 to 192.168.1.1. The third and the fourth line deﬁne the keys for the data encryption the same way as the ﬁrst two lines. Finally the “spadd” lines deﬁne two policies, namely packets going out from 192.168.1.1 to 192.168.1.169 should be (require) encoded (esp) and “signed” with the authorization header. The second policy is for incoming packets and it is the same as outgoing packages. Please be aware that you should not use these keys, but your own secretly kept unique keys. You can generate keys using the /dev/random device:
# dd if=/dev/random count=16 bs=1 | xxd -ps

This command uses dd to output 16 bytes from /dev/random. Don’t forget to add “0x” at the beginning of the line in the conﬁguration ﬁles. You can use the 16 byte (128 bits) for the hmac-md5 algorithm that is used for AH. The 3des-cbc algorithm that is used for ESP in the example should be fed with a 24 byte (192 bits) key. These keys can be generated with:
# dd if=/dev/random count=24 bs=1 | xxd -ps

Make sure that the /etc/setkey.conf ﬁle can only be read by the root user. If normal users can read the keys IPsec provides no security at all. You can do this with:
# chmod 600 /etc/setkey.conf

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Chapter 24. IPsec The same /etc/setkey.conf can be created on the 192.168.1.169 host, with inverted -P in and -P out options. So, the /etc/setkey.conf will look like this:
#!/usr/sbin/setkey -f # Flush the SAD and SPD flush; spdflush; add 192.168.1.1 192.168.1.169 ah 0x200 -A hmac-md5 0xa731649644c5dee92cbd9c2e7e188ee6; add 192.168.1.169 192.168.1.1 ah 0x300 -A hmac-md5 0x27f6d123d7077b361662fc6e451f65d8; add 192.168.1.1 192.168.1.169 esp 0x201 -E 3des-cbc 0x656c8523255ccc23a66c1917aa0cf30991fce83532a4b224; add 192.168.1.169 192.168.1.1 esp 0x301 -E 3des-cbc 0xc966199f24d095f3990a320d749056401e82b26570320292 spdadd 192.168.1.1 192.168.1.169 any -P in ipsec esp/transport//require ah/transport//require; spdadd 192.168.1.169 192.168.1.1 any -P out ipsec esp/transport//require ah/transport//require;

Activating the IPsec conﬁguration
The IPsec conﬁguration can be activated with the setkey command:
# setkey -f /etc/setkey.conf

If you want to enable IPsec permanently you can add the following line to /etc/rc.d/rc.local on both hosts:
/usr/sbin/setkey -f /etc/setkey.conf

After conﬁguring IPsec you can test the connection by running tcpdump and simultaneously pinging the other host. You can see if AH and ESP are actually used in the tcpdump output:

# tcpdump -i eth0 tcpdump: listening on eth0 11:29:58.869988 terrapin.taickim.net > 192.168.1.169: AH(spi=0x00000200,seq=0x40f): ESP(s 11:29:58.870786 192.168.1.169 > terrapin.taickim.net: AH(spi=0x00000300,seq=0x33d7): ESP(

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Setting up IPsec with automatic key exchanging
Introduction
The subject of automatical key exchange is already touched shortly in the introduction of this chapter. Put simply, IPsec with IKE works in the following steps. 1. Some process on the host wants to connect to another host. The kernel checks whether there is a security policy set up for the other host. If there already is a security association corresponding with the policy the connection can be made, and will be authenticated, encrypted and/or compressed as deﬁned in the security association. If there is no security association, the kernel will request a user-land IKE daemon to set up the necessary security association(s). 2. During the ﬁrst phase of the key exchange the IKE daemon will try to verify the authenticity of the other host. This is usually done with a preshared key or certiﬁcate. If the authentication is successful a secure channel is set up between the two hosts, usually called a IKE security association, to continue the key exchange. 3. During the second phase of the key exchange the security associations for communication with the other host are set up. This involves choosing the encryption algorithm to be used, and generating keys that are used for encryption of the communication. 4. At this point the ﬁrst step is repeated again, but since there are now security associations the communication can proceed. The racoon IKE daemon is included with the KAME IPsec tools, the sections that follow explain how to set up racoon.

Using racoon with a preshared key
As usual the ﬁrst step to set up IPsec is to deﬁne security policies. In contrast to the manual keying example you should not set up security associations, because racoon will make them for you. We will use the same host IPs as in the example above. The security policy rules look like this:
#!/usr/sbin/setkey -f # Flush the SAD and SPD flush; spdflush; spdadd 192.168.1.1 192.168.1.169 any -P out ipsec esp/transport//require; spdadd 192.168.1.169 192.168.1.1 any -P in ipsec esp/transport//require;

Cautious souls have probably noticed that AH policies are missing in this example. In most situations this is no problem, ESP can provide authentication. But you should be aware that the authentication is more narrow; it does not protect information outside the ESP headers. But it is more efﬁcient than encapsulating ESP packets in AH. With the security policies set up you can conﬁgure racoon. Since the connection-speciﬁc information, like the authentication method is speciﬁed in the phase one conﬁguration. We can use a

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Chapter 24. IPsec general phase two conﬁguration. It is also possible to make speciﬁc phase two settings for certain hosts. But generally speaking a general conﬁguration will often sufﬁce in simple setups. We will also add paths for the preshared key ﬁle, and certiﬁcation directory. This is an example of /etc/racoon/racoon.conf with the paths and a general phase two policy set up:
path pre_shared_key "/etc/racoon/psk.txt"; path certificate "/etc/racoon/certs"; sainfo anonymous { { pfs_group 2; lifetime time 1 hour; encryption_algorithm 3des, blowfish 448, rijndael; authentication_algorithm hmac_sha1, hmac_md5; compression_algorithm deflate; }

The sainfo identiﬁer is used to make a block that speciﬁes the settings for security associations. Instead of setting this for a speciﬁc host, the anonymous parameter is used to specify that these settings should be used for all hosts that do not have a speciﬁc conﬁguration. The pfs_group speciﬁes which group of Difﬁe-Hellman exponentiations should be used. The different groups provide different lengths of base prime numbers that are used for the authentication process. Group 2 provides a 1024 bit length if you would like to use a greater length, for increased security, you can use another group (like 14 for a 2048 bit length). The encryption_algorithm speciﬁes which encryption algorithms this host is willing to use for ESP encryption. The authentication_algorithm speciﬁes the algorithm to be used for ESP Authentication or AH. Finally, the compression_algorithm is used to specify which compression algorithm should be used when IPcomp is speciﬁed in an association. The next step is to add a phase one conﬁguration for the key exchange with the other host to the racoon conﬁguration. For example:
remote 192.168.1.169 { exchange_mode aggressive, main; my_identifier address; proposal { encryption_algorithm 3des; hash_algorithm sha1; authentication_method pre_shared_key; dh_group 2; } }

The remote block speciﬁes a phase one conﬁguration. The exchange_mode is used to conﬁgure what exchange mode should be used for phase. You can specify more than one exchange mode, but the ﬁrst method is used if this host is the initiator of the key exchange. The my_identifier option speciﬁes what identiﬁer should be sent to the remote host. If this option committed address is used, which sends the IP address as the identiﬁer. The proposal block speciﬁes parameter that will be proposed to the other host during phase one authentication. The encryption_algorithm, and dh_group are explained above. The hash_algorithm option is mandatory, and conﬁgures the hash algorithm that should be used. This can be md5, or sha1. The authentication_method is crucial for this conﬁguration, as this parameter is used to specify that a preshared key should be used, with pre_shared_key.

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Chapter 24. IPsec With racoon set up there is one thing left to do, the preshared key has to be added to /etc/racoon/psk.txt. The syntax is very simple, each line contains a host IP address and a key. These parameters are separated with a tab. For example:
192.168.1.169 somekey

Activating the IPsec conﬁguration
At this point the conﬁguration of the security policies and racoon is complete, and you can start to test the conﬁguration. It is a good idea to start racoon with the -F parameter. This will run racoon in the foreground, making it easier to catch error messages. To wrap it up:
# setkey -f /etc/setkey.conf # racoon -F

Now that you have added the security policies to the security policy database, and started Racoon, you can test your IPsec conﬁguration. For instance, you could ping the other host to start with. The ﬁrst time you ping the other host, this will fail:
\$ ping 192.168.1.169 connect: Resource temporarily unavailable

The reason for this is that the security associations still have to be set up. But the ICMP packet will trigger the key exchange. ping will trigger the key exchange. You can see whether the exchange was succesful or not by looking at the Racoon log messages in /var/log/messages, or the racoon output if you started racoon in the foreground. A succesful key exhange looks like this:
Apr Apr Apr Apr Apr Apr Apr Apr Apr 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 17:14:58 17:14:58 17:14:58 17:14:58 17:14:58 17:14:58 17:14:59 17:14:59 17:14:59 terrapin terrapin terrapin terrapin terrapin terrapin terrapin terrapin terrapin racoon: racoon: racoon: racoon: racoon: racoon: racoon: racoon: racoon:

INFO: IPsec-SA request for 192.168.1.169 queued due to INFO: initiate new phase 1 negotiation: 192.168.1.1[500 INFO: begin Aggressive mode. INFO: received Vendor ID: DPD NOTIFY: couldn’t find the proper pskey, try to get one INFO: ISAKMP-SA established 192.168.1.1[500]-192.168.1. INFO: initiate new phase 2 negotiation: 192.168.1.1[0]< INFO: IPsec-SA established: ESP/Transport 192.168.1.169 INFO: IPsec-SA established: ESP/Transport 192.168.1.1->

After the key exchange, you can verify that IPsec is set up correctly by analyzing the packets that go in and out with tcpdump. tcpdump is available in the n diskset. Suppose that the outgoing connection to the other host goes through the eth0 interface, you can analyze the packats that go though the eth0 interface with tcpdump -i eth0. If the outgoing packets are encrypted with ESP, you can see this in the tcpdump output. For example:
# tcpdump -i eth0 tcpdump: verbose output suppressed, use -v or -vv for full protocol decode listening on eth0, link-type EN10MB (Ethernet), capture size 96 bytes 17:27:50.241067 IP terrapin.taickim.net > 192.168.1.169: ESP(spi=0x059950e8,seq=0x9) 17:27:50.241221 IP 192.168.1.169 > terrapin.taickim.net: ESP(spi=0x0ddff7e7,seq=0x9)

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Chapter 25. The Internet super server
Introduction
There are two ways to offer TCP/IP services: by running server applications standalone as a daemon or by using the Internet super server, inetd(8). inetd is a daemon which monitors a range of ports. If a client attempts to connect to a port inetd handles the connection and forwards the connection to the server software which handles that kind of connection. The advantage of this approach is that it adds an extra layer of security and it makes it easier to log incoming connections. The disadvantage is that it is somewhat slower than using a standalone daemon. It is thus a good idea to run a standalone daemon on, for example, a heavily loaded FTP server.

Conﬁguration
inetd can be conﬁgured using the /etc/inetd.conf ﬁle. Let’s have a look at an example line from
inetd.conf: # File Transfer Protocol (FTP) server: ftp stream tcp nowait root

/usr/sbin/tcpd

proftpd

This line speciﬁes that inetd should accept FTP connections and pass them to tcpd. This may seem a bit odd, because proftpd normally handles FTP connections. You can also specify to use proftpd directly in inetd.conf, but Slackware Linux normally passes the connection to tcpd. This program passes the connection to proftpd in turn, as speciﬁed. tcpd is used to monitor services and to provide host based access control. Services can be disabled by adding the comment character (#) at the beginning of the line. It is a good idea to disable all services and enable services you need one at a time. After changing /etc/inetd.conf inetd needs to be restarted to activate the changes. This can be done by sending the HUP signal to the inetd process:
# ps ax | grep ’inetd’ 64 ? S 0:00 /usr/sbin/inetd # kill -HUP 64

Or you can use the rc.inetd initialization script to restart inetd:
# /etc/rc.d/rc.inetd restart

TCP wrappers
As you can see in /etc/inetd.conf connections for most protocols are made through tcpd, instead of directly passing the connection to a service program. For example:
# File Transfer Protocol (FTP) server: ftp stream tcp nowait root

/usr/sbin/tcpd

proftpd

In this example ftp connections are passed through tcpd. tcpd logs the connection through syslog and allows for additional checks. One of the most used features of tcpd is host-based access control.

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Chapter 25. The Internet super server Hosts that should be denied are controlled via /etc/hosts.deny, hosts that should be allowed via /etc/hosts.allow. Both ﬁles have one rule on each line of the following form:
service: hosts

Hosts can be speciﬁed by hostname or IP address. The ALL keyword speciﬁes all hosts or all services. Suppose we want to block access to all services managed through tcpd, except for host “trusted.example.org”. To do this the following hosts.deny and hosts.allow ﬁles should be created.
/etc/hosts.deny: ALL: ALL /etc/hosts.allow: ALL: trusted.example.org

In the hosts.deny access is blocked to all (ALL) services for all (ALL) hosts. But hosts.allow speciﬁes that all (ALL) services should be available to “trusted.example.org”.

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Chapter 26. Apache
Introduction
Apache is the most popular web server since April 1996. It was originally based on NCSA httpd, and has grown into a full-featured HTTP server. Slackware Linux currently uses the 1.3.x branch of Apache. This chapter is based on Apache 1.3.x.

Installation
Apache can be installed by adding the apache package from the “n” disk set. If you also want to use PHP, the php (“n” disk set) and mysql (“ap” disk set) are also required. MySQL is required, because the precompiled PHP depends on MySQL shared libraries. You do not have to run MySQL itself. After installing Apache it can be started automatically while booting the system by making the /etc/rc.d/rc.httpd ﬁle executable. You can do this by executing:
# chmod a+x /etc/rc.d/rc.httpd

The Apache conﬁguration can be altered in the /etc/apache/httpd.conf ﬁle. Apache can be stopped/started/restarted every moment with the apachectl command, and the stop, start and restart parameters. For example, execute the following command to restart Apache:
# apachectl restart /usr/sbin/apachectl restart: httpd restarted

User directories
Apache provides support for so-call user directories. This means every user gets web space in the form of http://host/~user/ . The contents of “~user/” is stored in a subdirectory in the home directory of the user. This directory can be speciﬁed using the “UserDir” option in httpd.conf, for example:
UserDir public_html

This speciﬁes that the public_html directory should be used for storing the web pages. For example, the web pages at URL http://host/~snail/ are stored in /home/snail/public_html.

Virtual hosts
The default documentroot for Apache under Slackware Linux is /var/www/htdocs. Without using virtual hosts every client connecting to the Apache server will receive the website in this directory. So, if we have two hostnames pointing to the server, “www.example.org” and “forum.example.org”, both will display the same website. You can make separate sites for different hostnames by using virtual hosts. In this example we are going to look how you can make two virtual hosts, one for “www.example.org”, with the documentroot /var/www/htdocs-www, and “forum.example.org”, with the documentroot /var/www/htdocs-forum. First of all we have to specify which IP

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Chapter 26. Apache addresses Apache should listen to. Somewhere in the /etc/apache/httpd.conf conﬁguration ﬁle you will ﬁnd the following line:
#NameVirtualHost *:80

This line has to be commented out to use name-based virtual hosts. Remove the comment character (#) and change the parameter to “BindAddress IP:port”, or “BindAddress *:port” if you want Apache to bind to all IP addresses the host has. Suppose we want to provide virtual hosts for IP address 192.168.1.201 port 80 (the default Apache port), we would change the line to:
NameVirtualHost 192.168.1.201:80

Somewhere below the NameVirtualHost line you can ﬁnd a commented example of a virtualhost:
#<VirtualHost *:80> # ServerAdmin webmaster@dummy-host.example.com # DocumentRoot /www/docs/dummy-host.example.com # ServerName dummy-host.example.com # ErrorLog logs/dummy-host.example.com-error_log # CustomLog logs/dummy-host.example.com-access_log common #</VirtualHost>

You can use this example as a guideline. For example, if we want to use all the default values, and we want to write the logs for both virtual hosts to the default Apache logs, we would add these lines:
<VirtualHost 192.168.1.201:80> DocumentRoot /var/www/htdocs-www ServerName www.example.org </VirtualHost> <VirtualHost 192.168.1.201:80> DocumentRoot /var/www/htdocs-forum ServerName forum.example.org </VirtualHost>

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Chapter 27. BIND
Introduction
The domain name system (DNS) is used to convert human-friendly host names (for example www.slackware.com) to IP addresses. BIND (Berkeley Internet Name Domain) is the most widely used DNS daemon, and will be covered in this chapter.

Delegation
One of the main features is that DNS requests can be delegated. For example, suppose that you own the “linuxcorp.com” domain. You can provide the authorized nameservers for this domain, you nameservers are authoritative for the “linuxcorp.com”. Suppose that there are different branches within your company, and you want to give each branch authority over their own zone, that is no problem with DNS. You can delegate DNS for e.g. “sales.linuxcorp.com” to another nameserver within the DNS conﬁguration for the “linuxcorp.com” zone. The DNS system has so-called root servers, which delegate the DNS for millions of domain names and extensions (for example, country speciﬁc extensions, like “.nl” or “.uk”) to authorized DNS servers. This system allows a branched tree of delegation, which is very ﬂexible, and distributes DNS trafﬁc.

DNS records
The following types are common DNS records: Table 27-1. DNS records Preﬁx A CNAME MX Description An A records points to an IP address. A CNAME record points to another DNS entry. A MX record speciﬁes which should handle mail for the domain.

Masters and slaves
Two kinds of nameservers can be provided for a domain name: a master and slaves. The master server DNS records are authoritative. Slave servers download their DNS record from the master servers. Using slave servers besides a master server is recommended for high availability and can be used for load-balancing.

Making a caching nameserver
A caching nameserver provides DNS services for a machine or a network, but does not provide DNS

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Chapter 27. BIND for a domain. That means it can only be used to convert hostnames to IP addresses. Setting up a nameserver with Slackware Linux is fairly easy, because BIND is conﬁgured as a caching nameserver by default. Enabling the caching nameserver takes just two steps: you have to install BIND and alter the initialization scripts. BIND can be installed by adding the bind package from the “n” disk set. After that bind can be started by executing the named(8) command. If want to start BIND by default, make the /etc/rc.d/rc.bind ﬁle executable. This can be done by executing the following command as root:
# chmod a+x /etc/rc.d/rc.bind

If you want to use the nameserver on the machine that runs BIND, you also have to alter /etc/resolv.conf.

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