Networking Summary

Over the past week, you’ve seen the major networking programs that install be default in Linux. Hopefully, you’ve seen why Linux is the leader in networking capabilities. And it all stems from its heritage in Unix.

We’ve seen that FTP is the standard for transferring files from one machine to another. We’ve looked at telnet and its ability to control a machine remotely, across the network. We’ve also talked about the insecurity of telnet, and provided a warning that most users should not install the telnet server on their machine. We closed the series with discussion about both ssh and scp. These programs are secure alternatives to telnet, serving the same remote control functions with much less risk of exposing your system on the Internet.

There are a few that we haven’t talked about. rsh, rcp and rlogin are also programs for remote access to machines. I didn’t mention these programs this week because, due to their inherent insecurity, they’re nearly obsolete. The functions of these programs have, for the most part, been picked up by the ssh package.

Beginning next week, we’ll look at the Linux kernel, the core of the operating system.