Introduction

Welcome to the Official Red Hat Linux Reference Guide.

The Official Red Hat Linux Reference Guide contains useful information about your Red Hat Linux

system. From fundamental concepts, such as the structure of the Red Hat Linux file system, to the

finer points of system security and authentication control, we hope you will find this book to be a

valuable resource.

This guide is for you if you want to learn a bit more about how your Red Hat Linux system works.

Topics that you can explore within this manual include the following:

The file system structure

The boot process

The X Windowing System

Security issues

Network services

1. Changes To This Manual

This manual has been reorganized for clarity and updated for the latest features of Red Hat Linux 8.0.

Some of the changes include:

A New Boot Loaders Chapter

The GRUB chapter has been revised and expanded to include LILO.

An Updated Apache HTTP Server Chapter

There is now a guide for migrating from version 1.3 to version 2.0 of the Apache HTTP Server.

Also, the list of server configuration options has been updated. Special thanks to Gary Benson

and Joe Orton for his hard work on the Apache HTTP Server migration guide.

Updated LDAP Chapter

The LDAP chapter has been cleaned up and reorganized.

Updated

iptables

Chapter

The

iptables

chapter has been clarified and reorganized.

Updated Tripwire Chapter

The Tripwire chapter has been clarified and reorganized (and even has a fancy new illustration

; ).

Before reading this guide, you should be familiar with the contents of the Official Red Hat Linux

Installation Guide concerning installation issues, the Official Red Hat Linux Getting Started Guide for

basic Linux concepts and the Official Red Hat Linux Customization Guide for general customization

instructions. The Official Red Hat Linux Reference Guide contains information about advanced topics

that may not affect every user, depending upon how they use their Red Hat Linux system.

HTML and PDF versions of all Official Red Hat Linux manuals are available online at

http://www.redhat.com/docs.