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Front cover - IBM Redbooks

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394 Lotus Security Handbook<br />

► Red Hat: This distribution has the most name recognition and is usually the<br />

first to get any sort of corporate support in the way of commercial software or<br />

commercial technical service. Many vendors, including Oracle, <strong>IBM</strong>, and<br />

Check Point, have released products for Red Hat-specific distributions. This<br />

does not mean that those software releases will not run on other GNU/Linux<br />

distributions, but if there is a problem, the vendor might not support your<br />

installation of its product on a non-Red Hat distribution.<br />

► Debian: This distribution also deserves mention. First, not because it is<br />

entirely free, but because it is maintained by a nonprofit organization made up<br />

entirely of volunteers. These volunteers are highly motivated by quality and<br />

pride in their efforts to make Debian the most stable and completely 100%<br />

free distribution available. Debian has proven to be extremely stable and easy<br />

to manage and upgrade remotely. The upgrade process is by far the easiest<br />

of any of the GNU/Linux distributions. Debian installations can be upgraded<br />

without the need for reboots, replacing every installed package and running<br />

process excepting the kernel. Additionally, the Debian packaging system and<br />

its front ends allow extremely fine-grained control over which packages,<br />

utilities, libraries, and files exist on your system. Debian also is currently<br />

available on six different architectures, with more than 3,900 included<br />

software packages to select from when installing.<br />

Other noteworthy distributions are SUSE, which is the distribution of choice in<br />

Germany and sports a really good installation tool called YAST2, which makes<br />

installing the distribution incredibly easy. TurboLinux and Caldera are also on the<br />

list of supported GNU/Linux distributions upon which the Domino server will run.<br />

For all GNU/Linux distributions that employ an installation tool, “Custom<br />

Installation” should be chosen and the individual packages needed for the server<br />

to be installed should be selected. Other than for ease of use, there should be no<br />

need to install development packages, any of the new KDE or GNOME desktops,<br />

and certainly not X Window (especially not in combination with Domino, since<br />

Domino works via a text console on the server). Unfortunately, none of the<br />

aforementioned distributions provides a minimal secure server predefined<br />

installation. It is therefore necessary to harden the server manually.<br />

During the installation process, the “enable shadow password” file support<br />

should be chosen; likewise, MD5 hashes should be chosen for the passwords<br />

rather than the normal crypt function. If these options are not presented at install<br />

time, they can be changed after installation. In Red Hat, the setup utility should<br />

be used. In Debian, the shadowconfig utility should be used to enable or disable<br />

shadow passwords. For other distributions of GNU/Linux, check the man pages<br />

for details on this topic. To enable MD5 hashes, the appropriate files under<br />

/etc/pam.d should be edited to include md5 on the password lines.

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