Certification Summary

Networking services are an integral part of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. NFS, vsFTP, and Samba are a few of the services that you can configure for this operating system.

NFS allows you to share filesystems between Linux and Unix computers. This is a powerful method of controlling data and distributing I/O load, but there are many security concerns involved with its use. Be careful when setting up an NFS share on an unprotected network.

Red Hat includes one FTP server, the very secure FTP service. You can configure it in detail through the /etc/vsftpd/vsftpd.conf configuration file.

Samba allows a Linux computer to appear like any other Microsoft computer on a Microsoft Windows-based network. Samba is based on the Server Message Block protocol, which allows Microsoft computers to communicate on a TCP/IP network. It has evolved as Microsoft has adapted SMB to the Common Internet File System.

The main Samba configuration file, /etc/samba/smb.conf, includes separate sections for global settings and share definitions. The Red Hat Samba Server Configuration tool is a GUI tool that makes it easier to configure smb.conf. Changes to smb.conf can be easily tested with the testparm utility.