Hi all,
I am looking for recommendations on resources to learn Linux networking. I am primarily hoping for text resources such as books, guides, blog series, articles, etc. I have trouble focusing on videos.
I am mainly targeting linux networking topics, such as how the linux networking stack works, and things like iptables, network namespaces, network interfaces, sockets, NAT, firewalls, internal IP-addressing, subnetting, routing, proxying, internal DNS, and anything that I may not know exists but is related to these concepts and linux networking in general.
Any recommendations?
I cut my teeth on an early version of The Linux Networking Howto, still available at tldp.org. That’s a little bit out of date now :-) but the basic IPv4 networking concepts are still good.
These days so much is implementation or distribution dependent. There has been so much very rapid development in this field during the internet era that the age of documentation matters significantly.
A mitigating, but also confusing, factor is that different generations of networking tools have backwards compatibility built in so that it has been possible to build firewalls on kernels running nftables using iptables utilities in userspace.
I think you could do worse than starting with the Debian wikis and then drilling down into other documentation for the specific distributions or applications you want to use.
I seem to remember that openwrt.org and shorewall.org (though that product is EOL) also have some good overarching network stuff. I think Hurricane Electric he.com may still do their free basic IPv6 certificate programme?
Wikipedia is also your friend in this, especially the references.
I’ve enjoyed onemarcfifty.com’s videos too, but that format isn’t what you are looking for, and the transcripts I have seen are not formatted.
The best thing to do imo is insight thru experience - build your own networks (plural), your own software, secure them then connect them.
That was honestly what I was trying, but I felt myself blindly following tutorials without understanding what any of those components are or doing. And searching individual terms was not good enough. The concepts seem intertwined, and searching the web only gave me surface level explanations that didn't cut it.
