hardening linux
When I first saw this book, I thought it was just going to be another book covering the basics of doing a secure install, throwing an iptables firewall up, and running tripwire. Needless to say, I was a bit surprised when I scanned the table of contents. The first thought in my head was, "hey, this has everything in it." And it does.
Turnbull starts the book off by explaining that this is not a distribution specific book. Though the majority of the examples are Red Hat based, he does include a lot of information on installing programs from source and adding Debian specific examples when he can.
The first chapter, "Hardening the Basics", I felt, was very unorganized. In one section, he explains passwords which then branches off into PAM. PAM is then mentioned all over again in another section. I also felt the discussion of PAM, in total, was very confusing. It was very hard to follow and at some points I was confused over things about PAM that I already knew. After finishing up the first chapter, my hopes for the rest of the book were very low.
Fortunately, the rest of the book was not like that first chapter. Some notable chapters include the chapter on IPTables. Though it did not cover anything about NAT, it was fairly complete for a single host firewall. The chapter on Logging was also decent with it's coverage on syslog-ng and SEC. Finally, BIND received a nice sized discussion (which it deserved). I think this chapter was the most throughout and in-depth of all the others. The rest of the book was on par with what it was covering.
All in all, I don't feel this book would be a definitive guide to hardening a Linux box, however, it would probably come in handy for reference on a couple issues. I'll give it a 7 out of 10.
