Charles Steinkuehler's LEAF/LRP Website

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Click on one of the book images, below, to go to Amazon.com where you can place an order, or the banner to the left to go the Amazon.com home page.  I own each of the books listed below, and have used them as described in working with LRP.

Building Internet Firewalls - Second edition

This is a must have book for anyone maintaining an internet firewall.  While it is not exactly a step-by-step howto, this book includes everything from basic information to help the novice network user understand firewalls, to details needed by the experienced user to support 'problem' protocols.

This book is a reference covering all standard linux commands, and includes chapters on shell scripting, variable substution, and regular expressions as well.  When using LRP, which does not come with online man pages, I find myself reaching for this book a lot.  The level of detail documenting each command is in-between the basic command line usage printout you get with LRP and the full man page documentation.

This is a general book on installing and running linux.  While not specifically written for LRP or Debian (which LRP is based on), this book covers a lot of general linux setup and configuration at the core, configuration file, level.  Most of the 'targeted' linux books are heavily oriented to graphics configuration utilities running under X windows, which has pretty much no relation to LRP.  

A distillation of what open-source really is, why it works, and how it's changing software business models.  A must-read if you want to understand the key forces behind the Open-Source movement that makes linux and LRP possible.

Pretty much everything you need to know about the main internet protocols.  Covers ARP, IGMP, ICMP, UDP, and TCP.  This book works nicely if you need more info than is in Building Internet Firewalls, above.  I use this book a lot when trying to make sense of martian or denied packet messges in my log files, or tweak low level firewall rules.

The 'bible' of TCP/IP networking.  Volume 1 covers just about everything you need to know about TCP/IP unless you are writing an IP stack youself (in which case, buy Volume 2, as well ;-).  The beauty of this book is that the basic concepts and reasons behind the many IP protocols are explained clearly enough for even the novice network administrator, while providing a treasure trove of technical data.  Only hard core programmers or packet sniffers will need more data than is contained in Volume 1, in which case you can purchase Volume 2, or use the references to the applicable RFC's which are all throughout the book.

Everything you need to setup and run Apache.  I run thttpd on LRP as my primary web server (small, secure, and fast), but Apache works much better for modern dynamic content (you won't notice much in the way of 'shopping carts' or fancy server generated content on my site), so I run Apache on some of my internal servers.

The reference manual for setting up DNS services with BIND.  Use this book along with my bind.lrp to set up DNS on your LRP system.

Everything you need to know to get Samba running on LRP or any other unix/linux based platform.  This book is also an excellent discussion of the details of Microsoft networking via TCP/IP, and is extremely usefull in setting up a windows network that crosses routers or gateways, even if you are not running Samba.

The only book here that's not from O'Reilly, this book is substantially larger than Using Samba, above, and includes more practical configuration examples.  I bought this book because of the entire chapter dedicated to cross-subnet browsing.  For most users, if you only buy one Samba book, you probably want this one because of the many example configurations provided.

The definitive reference for sendmail.  If you're running sendmail on your site, you need this book.