hookup to cable modem was easy

On Sat, 2002-08-17 at 11:49, Craig S. wrote:
> All I can say is wow! I have never used DHCP before or tried to setup a *nix system with a DHCP connection. It was much easier than I expected, no wonder there are hardly any how-to's for specific connections. I dropped a netgear FA-310TX 10/100MB card into one of my PCI slots. Setup tulip drivers for kernel and setup the new image. Hooked up the cable modem, ran ifconfig and answered 3 questions:
>
> 1) dynamic for the IP address
> 2) host_name = whatever you want (I think this was the question)
> 3) domain_name = cox.net
>
> rebooted the system and bam.... I was online. I am a little concerned about security cause I guess I have a static IP now or at least the cable modem has a static IP. I set hosts.deny to not allow any outside connections (to ports?), outside of AIM, nntp, e-mail, www, and ftp I don't do much else. and with AIM I have a set list of people that I correspond with and that is it. Should I setup iptables for a little more insurance? I don't have anything really confidential or needing security, all my work now is with genetic algorithms and neural nets which I backup periodically. My main security concern is someone just maliciously or even just a curiosity seeker getting user access or rooting the system and screwing it up in the process because I am lazy and don't want to reconfigure my system from scratch. I have been watching my logs, using netstat, and using other basic security measures and haven't seen any malicious activity that I notice but as I said before I am no netwo!
> rk security guru. Hell I am not even a network guru.
>
> Also when I want to SU to drop something say in /usr/local/bin or to do system maintenance can I kill and restart dhcpd or do I have to reboot when I restart dhcpd.

With linux, the ONLY time you HAVE to reboot when something happens is
when you change kernels. All other things can be done on the fly.
With networking stuff you can use sevral utilities out there that will
help you stop and start different services, or you can goto /etc/init.d/
(or /etc/rc.d/init.d/) and there are scripts in there that will start,
stop, and usualy give you the status. All you have to do is run
/etc/init.d/network stop and then the same thing with start when you
want to bring it back up. You can also do a restart if you just change
some setting and you want the new settings to take effect.

As for hosts.allow/deny they only apply to server that are using inetd
or xinetd or a few programs that are written to use it, like sshd.
If you want to make yourself invisible on the net, or just want to cover
servers that don't use inetd (apache I dont think does) you will
definatly want to look into useing iptable.

Brian Cluff