Home away from home
I don’t drive a flashy car, own a fancy house, or even watch a big screen TV — but boy, do I have nice computers. When I worked in a cubicle, it chafed me that the equipment I was supposed to use was quite a bit clunkier than what I was used to at home.
One of the many wonderful things about high-speed Internet is that I can get to my home setup from darn near anywhere. It’s easier with Linux or Mac, of course, but since PC laptops are a commodity, the ability to do it with Microsoft Windows is also a good tool to have in the kit.
A practical iptables firewall in Linux
“We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone,” and iptables is how we do it. Rather than spend a lot of time trying to explain how ipchains begat iptables, let’s jump in. There are enough comments in the code so that everything will make sense, even if we skip much of the theory.
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Introduction to DNS
If you could ask your computer how it feels about domain names, it would say “Looking up domain names is a big pain in my shiny metal tush.” Domain Names were not invented for the benefit of computers. They are purely for people.
Let’s say your name is Bob, and you want to register the domain name “example.com”.
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What is SAMBA?
When you connect a Linux machine and a Microsoft Windows machine to the same Local Area Network, they may not automatically see each other. That is, the Linux machine won’t show up in Windows’ Network Neighborhood nor will the Windows disks be available under Linux. Samba changes that — with it, you can quite easily do both.
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LAN101 - The TCP/IP Network
A LAN is a Local Area Network — it’s a fancy way of saying “the two or three computers in this room, give or take the dozen down the hall.” It implies a fast connection — dozens, hundreds, even thousands of times faster than a dial-up modem. It used to be pretty challenging to hook computers together this way, but the parts got cheaper and the software got smarter.
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Hubs, Switches, and Routers
If you want to connect three devices on a 10-Base-T LAN, that crossover cable we talked about in the previous chapter just won’t cut it. It’s time to get a hub, or a switch. To paraphrase the infamous Pitr, “Hub, switch, what is difference?”
They look a lot alike: There is a row of RJ-45 jacks, sometimes called “ports.” (What’s a “jack”? It looks like the hole in the wall where you’d plug in a telephone, only bigger.) There may be some lights to tell you it’s working. There will be some way to provide electric power to it — probably a “wall wart” transformer or a small “brick.” The prices have even started to converge — you can get a modest switch for about the same money as a similar hub.
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