Chapter 7. Custom Configuration and Administration Issues

For both personal use as well as at work, I was able to start with a standard installation of the Red Hat Linux distribution and provide services "out-of-the-box" with little or no changes to default configuration settings.

However, there were a number of small changes and extra services that were necessary to provide all the Internet, file & print services, and other services that are in use at my place of employment. The local administrator should be aware of the following:

• The ``/etc/rc.d/rc.local'' file is executed upon system start-up and contains any extra services you have added to your server that should be executed upon bootup.

• Look in /etc for any site-specific changes that may be required. These may include:

  • ``/etc/inetd.conf'' (you should ensure unnecessary services were disabled such as finger, echo, chargen; as well as add or change any services you may need)

  • ``/etc/exports'' (contains a list of hosts allowed to mount NFS volumes; see Section 7.6 for details)

  • ``/etc/organization'', ``/etc/nntpserver'', ``/etc/NNTP_INEWS_DOMAIN'' (set as appropriate)

  • ``/etc/lilo.conf'' (contains information for the LILO boot loader -- the process which loads the Linux kernel upon bootup; see Section 4.8 for details)

  • ``/etc/sudoers'' (a list of users who should be given special privileges, along with the commands they are allowed to execute)

  • ``/etc/named.boot'' (for DNS use; see Section 7.2 for details)

• Anything in ``/usr/local/'' (and subdirectories) are extra packages or modifications to existing ones that you have installed here, if you have installed from things like tarballs instead of using RPM. (Or at least, you should have installed them here.) These files, particularly in /usr/local/src/, should be kept up-to-date. See Chapter 10 for details.