UNIX

[rasczak]

The company I work for has classes opening up for penetration testing. I want to sign up but one of the prereqs is a background ( a good one at that ) in Unix. YThey don't offer any UNIX courses anytime soon so i was wondering if anyone had suggested reading for a person who's never touched a UNIX system before.

 

[Nothinman]

That's an extremely broad topic. You should probably find out why the unix experience is a prereq, the class probably uses a lot of tools running on Linux so if that's the case you should find out what distribution and start from there.

 

[Brazen]

I would just install Ubuntu Desktop and start from there. Get it working, make sure you can get to the internet so you can ask questions while you are playing with it. Then you'll probably want to get familiar with the command line. Even things you can do in the gui, figure how to do them instead on the command line just because I'm sure the class will focus on the command line due to it's flexibility. Figure out how to do things like navigate the folder structure, edit text documents, pipe commands together, read man pages, copy and move files, etc.

 

[rasczak]

good points. thanks for the help.

 

[Brazen]

If you are interested in making a purchase, this book review just showed up on Slashdot. It specifically covers Ubuntu, but most of it, especially the commandline stuff. The major difference will be package management. Debian-derivatives use debs/dpkg/apt/synaptic to install software, where-as Redhat-derivatives use rpms and usually yum (or apt-rpm is also popular), but usage of these is nearly identical.

According to the book review it looks like it covers everything from commandline and gui, basics to advanced.

 

[Title]

Best thing would be to install a form of linux and play around with the command line. Or better, find a Unix server that will let you have some space to play around with. If you take the class I assume they will give you an acoount.

Here are some links.

My class's unix guide/reference..uky


And a more general guide: gen

 

[rasczak]

Thanks for the links.

 

[kamper]

If you have two machines, or one machine and vmware, I'd recommend a bsd. They all have very carefully maintained manuals (outside of the manual pages) that are big enough to teach you a lot but not so big that you can't read the entire things if you're motivated. Pick one, and read the installation section before doing anything else. Then read it again, but do the install on the other machine (or in vmware) at the same time. Then they'll kick you to a command line where you won't have any idea what you're doing and you'll be forced to keep reading the manual to figure anything out. Learn how to install software (ports or packages), how to configure additional network interfaces, how the system starts up and how to manipulate which daemons run, how to build the system from source, how to get a graphical user interface going... (if you're really enthusiastic, read the entire man page for whatever shell you're running) The difference between that and say, Ubuntu, is that in Ubuntu you'll have the snazzy interface right from the beginning that you can fall back on if you don't feel like learning much. That and, in my experience, the community documentation is more geared towards "how do I get this particular thing done?" than "what are the underlying concepts that I need to understand?"

Or heck, do them both. It would be a good idea to get an idea of what is system-specific and what is common to all unixes.